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THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
SIDNEY DARK 





















































1 

THE BOOK OF 
FRANCE 

For Young People 

BY 

SIDNEY DARK 

|| 

Author of “The Glory that is France“The Booh 
of England” etc . 


/ y v/ / 

WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS 


NEW 'GS? YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 












THE BOOK OF FRANCE. HI. 

HUNTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


DEC-5'23 

©C1A7 0G161 ^ 









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TO MY AMERICAN READERS 

My Dears , 

ji I wrote this little book two years ago in order 
/ to tell English boys and girls something about 
the French people and the great country of France 
in which so many English soldiers fought during 
the Great War, and where so many English sol¬ 
diers lie buried far away from their own homes. 
It seemed to me that because brave French and 
English soldiers fought side by side, for what 
seemed to them a good and just cause, English 
children would like to know more about the people 
who are really their next-door neighbours. Of 
course you all know that towards the end of the 
war, thousands of American soldiers crossed the 
Atlantic also to fight in France, and you know too, 
that many of these splendid Americans were killed 
in the battles against the Germans, heroically giv¬ 
ing their lives for the same cause as the French 
and the English. I thought, therefore, that Amer¬ 
ican boys and girls would also be interested in 
the story of France. So I have slightly altered 
my book, which has already been read by hundreds 
of English children, in the hope that this American 


vi TO MY AMERICAN READERS 

edition may interest the boys and girls of your 
country. It has been a great pleasure to me to 
do this because, although I am an Englishman 
living in London, I have many cousins who are 
citizens of the United States, and I hope that 
some of my cousins may read this book and that 
it may give pleasure to them as well as to many 
other American boys and girls. 

It is very important that friendship and under¬ 
standing should always exist between the American, 
the English, and the French people. When you 
grow up, you will have the power to injure this 
friendship or to add to its influence in the world, 
and that is why I hope that you will read my book, 
and that, when you have read it, you will agree 
with me that the French are very fine and splendid 
people, with a fine and inspiring history. 

When you have learned that the French are nice 
and brave, then you will begin to wonder whether 
other peoples are not, also, quite as nice and quite 
as brave. And you will want to find out about 
them. When you have found out, you will discover 
that the differences between the different nations, 
who live in different parts of the world and speak 
different languages, are not so very great after all. 
And when everybody has learned this, there will be 
far less danger of quarrels and wars and of killing 
and maiming of soldiers. 


TO MY AMERICAN READERS vii 

Now, if you have read all this long letter and 
particularly the last two or three sentences, you 
will understand that The Book of France is 
intended to be a peace book, to be a tiny little 
help towards the creation of the better world— 
which perhaps you will see, though I am afraid 
that I am so old that I shall die before it can 
possibly be created—in which there will be no 
chance of a repetition of the horrible things that 
happened in this old world of ours, during the 
years of the Great War. 

One of the reasons why I wanted to write this 
book was that, although I am English and my 
family has been in England for four generations, 
long ago, much more than a hundred years ago, 
my family were peasants working in the fields of 
Normandy across the other side of the Channel, 
and when I was quite a little boy I liked to know 
that I had French blood in my veins and that I was 
both English and French. Since I have grown up 
I have learned a great deal about the country of my 
ancestors. It is a fine country and its people are a 
fine people. I think you will say the same thing 
when I have told you their story. 


Sidney Dark. 











































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CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I THE FRENCH AND THE ROMANS . . 15 

II THE DARK AGES ....... 28 

III FRANCE AND THE CRUSADES ... 42 

IV THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH . . 54 

V JOAN OF ARC. 1 . 69 

VI LOUIS XI AND HIS TIMES J . . .' 83 

VII THE VALOIS KINGS.94 

VIII HENRY THE FOURTH.108 

IX RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN .... 119 

X LE GRAND MONARQUE.130 

XI THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . . . 145 

XII THE REVOLUTION.158 

XIII NAPOLEON.172 

XIV THE NINETEENTH CENTURY . . . 187 

XV THE GREAT WAR.202 

XVI THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH . . 213 












/ 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

ENTRY OF JOAN OF ARC INTO ORLEANS Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

CORONATION OF CHARLEMAGNE .... 30 

THE MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 

AT THE CHATEAU D’EU. 46 

“THE MORNING OF THE BATTLE OF AGIN- 

court,” 1415. #. ... 54 

BIRTHPLACE OF JOAN OF ARC AT DOMREMY, 

NOW DESTROYED BY THE GERMANS . 70 

ARRIVAL OF LOUIS XI IN PARIS .... 86 

THE NIGHT OF THE MASSACRE OF ST. BAR¬ 
THOLOMEW . 94 

ENTRY OF HENRY IV INTO PAiOS, 1594 . . 110 

RICHELIEU AT LA ROCHELLE. 126 

LOUIS XIV AND MOLIlbRE. 134 

RECEPTION OF THE GRAND CCNd6 BY LOUIS 

XIV AT VERSAILLES, 1674 150 

MARIE ANTOINETTE LED TO EXECUTION . . 158 

LOUIS XVI AND HIS FAMILY IN HIS PRISON IN 

THE TEMPLE. 166 

NAPOLEON CROSSING THE ALPS .... 174 

FLIGHT OF LOUIS PHILIPPE FROM PARIS, 1848 190 

KING LOUIS PHILIPPE RECEIVING AN ADDRESS 
FROM THE CORPORATION OF LONDON IN THE 
RUBENS ROOM AT WINDSOR CASTLE, 1844. 214 


xi 





















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•• 








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THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


CHAPTER I 

THE FRENCH AND THE ROMANS 

I F you look in a history of England you will 
probably see that the first thing it tells you is, 
that Julius Csesar, the great Roman Emperor, 
invaded Britain in the year 55 b.c. The landing 
of Csesar and his Roman soldiers on the English 
coast is the real beginning of England’s story. 
Similarly, the real beginning of the story of France 
is the invasion of the country, which was then called 
Gaul, by the Romans some years before Julius 
Csesar came to Great Britain. Before the Romans 
invaded Gaul, the Gauls had invaded Italy and at 
one time the Romans were very much afraid that 
they would march south and threaten Rome itself. 

At the time of the Roman conquest of the two 
countries, the peoples who lived in France and 
Great Britain belonged to the same race and must 
have spoken very much the same language. For 
the most part they belonged to that race of men 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

whom we call Celts and whose direct descendants 
live to-day in Wales and Cornwall, in the north of 
Scotland, in parts of Ireland and in Brittany in 
France. But while most of the people in old France 
were Celts, other races had settled there before the 
Romans came. The great seaport of Marseilles, 
on the Mediterranean coast, was founded by sailors 
and merchants from Greece. Other French towns 
on the Mediterranean, including Nice, were also 
originally Greek colonies. 

Every modern nation is a mixture of several old 
races. The United States of America, the young¬ 
est of the great nations of the world, is a mixture of 
all the European peoples. The English are a mix¬ 
ture of Celts, Anglo-Saxons (which is almost the 
same as Germans), and Danes. The French are a 
mixture, too, and I shall have to tell you how many 
races have joined together to make modern France. 
Just now all I want you to remember is, that at the 
time of Julius Caesar, the people of France and the 
people of England were practically the same. You 
will remember that the priests of the ancient 
Britons were called Druids—I dare say that you 
know that there are still the ruins of a Druidical 
temple at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain—and 
that they regarded the mistletoe as a sacred plant. 
The Druids were also the priests of the French, or 
[ 16 ] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ROMANS 

as one ought to say, of the Gauls, and they had the 
same veneration for the mistletoe. 

Julius Csesar invaded France in 58 b.c. It took 
him nearly ten years to conquer the country, but 
by the end of the year 50 b.c., practically all of 
what we now know as France was under the sway 
of Rome. It is not necessary for me to bother you 
with the story of Caesar’s conquest, of the brave 
way in which the Gauls resisted the Roman legions, 
of the many battles that were fought, and how little 
by little Csesar wore down the opposition of the 
Gauls and defeated their armies. Sometimes it is 
a very dreadful thing when a country is conquered 
by a foreign enemy. Sometimes (though, perhaps, 
very rarely) it is a good thing. It was a very 
dreadful thing for France, when, in 1870, she was 
defeated by the Germans. But it was really a very 
good thing for the Gauls, when, almost two thou¬ 
sand years before, they were defeated by Csesar and 
his Romans. For, wherever the Roman armies 
marched, they carried law and civilization with 
them. I hardly suppose you understand how 
important law is to you and me, but I assure you 
that we should find it very uncomfortable to live in 
a country where there were no policemen to protect 
us, nobody to punish thieves, and no judges to 
decide quarrels. The Romans took all these things 

[17] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
with them, and, in consequence, wherever they 
went, life became more settled and the common man 
was safer. In all the countries that they conquered, 
they built roads—splendid roads—every bit as 
good as the roads we can make nowadays. Men 
were able to travel from town to town and from 
village to village on these fine Roman roads and to 
learn about each other, and to sell things to each 
other. 

When there are no roads, when it is difficult if 
not impossible for men to make even short journeys 
from one town to another town, or from one village 
to another village, men’s lives are very empty, and 
it is very difficult for them to know about anything 
except just their own little village and their own 
neighbours. Their ignorance makes them very 
selfish and narrow. So you will see that when the 
Romans went into France and into Britain and 
made roads, they also made the lives of the people 
in France and in Britain much broader and more 
interesting. The people began to know about other 
people who lived quite a long way away from them, 
and they began to understand that the world, which 
they had thought before was a very little place, was 
really a very big place, full of unexpected interests 
and of many wonderful things, of which they had 
never dreamed. 


THE FRENCH AND THE ROMANS 

When Csesar had conquered the Gauls, he 
treated them very kindly and leniently, although, 
while the fighting was still going on and the coun¬ 
try was still only half conquered, he was sometimes 
extremely cruel in order that he might terrify his 
opponents and frighten them into submission to his 
will. After one big battle, in which many of the 
Gauls had been taken prisoners, Caesar ordered his 
soldiers to cut off the right hand of each one of the 
prisoners. This was, of course, a very cruel and 
very cowardly thing, because the prisoners were 
not able to defend themselves. But though Cassar 
could sometimes act in this way, he is remembered 
in history for his generous conduct to his enemies 
when once the fighting was over. I dare say you 
have heard that, twenty years ago, the English 
fought against the Boers, the descendants of 
Dutchmen settled in South Africa, and made their 
country part of the British Empire. When, how¬ 
ever, the fighting had come to an end and the Boers 
had been compelled against their will to become 
part of the British Empire, the English said 
that they should make their own laws and rule 
themselves, and have exactly the same liberties and 
privileges as the English themselves. In this the 
English were following the example of Caesar and 
the old Romans. 


[19] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

When Gaul (you will remember this was the old 
name for France) had been forced to become part 
of the Roman Empire, the Gauls did not become 
slaves. They were not made to give up their liberty 
and to do just as the Romans told them, but they 
themselves became Roman citizens with the same 
rights and privileges as the men who lived in the 
city of Rome. 

When England had to fight Germany in the 
Great War, she was helped by regiments of Boer 
soldiers who came to fight by the side of the 
English soldiers in France, although a few years 
before they had fought against English soldiers in 
South Africa. In the same way, Csesar enlisted 
Gallic soldiers in the Roman army. He gave them 
special pay, and he formed them into special regi¬ 
ments that always bore the figure of a lark on their 
helmets. This lark was the emblem of watchfulness 
and gaiety, and these Gallic soldiers of Csesar’s 
used to sing during their long marches, and they 
were a great help to the Romans in winning some 
of their most important victories. The English let 
the Boers have a Parliament of their own. Csesar 
let the Gauls send their spokesmen to the Parlia¬ 
ment at Rome, where they took their part in the 
government of the Empire and were able to look 
after the particular interests of their own country. 

[ 20 ] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ROMANS 

In this way, the Gauls who, before the Romans 
came, were almost barbarians, learned the benefits 
of law and became a civilized nation. The Romans 
taught them how necessary schools were to a coun¬ 
try, and they taught them, too, that the poor 
people, who had no land, must be looked after, and, 
when it was impossible for them to get work and 
wages, that they must be supported at the public 
expense. 

You will see from all this how right I was when 
I said that it was a good thing for France when the 
Roman armies marched over the Alps and began 
to conquer their country. Wars are always a bad 
thing, since in every war many men are killed, 
many more are wounded, and many towns and 
villages are always destroyed. But it sometimes 
happens in the world that good comes out of evil, 
and a great good certainly came to France as a 
result of the Roman conquest. Almost all I have 
told you about the benefits that the Romans 
brought to France is also true of Great Britain. 
But Great Britain is farther away from Italy than 
France is, and the people who lived in Great 
Britain were not quite so much affected by the 
Romans as the French were, mainly because 
France and Italy are quite close to each other. 

In one thing, and one thing only, the Gauls tried 

[ 21 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

hard to resist the influence of the Romans. Despite 
persuasion and persecution, they clung to their own 
Druidical religion. All the nations of the earth 
have been like the Gauls in this respect. Men have 
often been willing to submit to a change of king 
and a change of government, but they have never 
been willing to be forced to change their religion, 
and they have over and over again been ready to 
face death and cruel torture rather than to worship 
God in any but their own way. The Russian Czars 
tried hard for many generations to compel the 
Poles to cease to be Roman Catholics, but they did 
not succeed. The French kings in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries tried hard to force the 
Protestants who lived in France to become Roman 
Catholics, and they also failed. 

The Druidical religion in which the Gauls be¬ 
lieved was barbarous and savage, and the Druids 
used to sacrifice human beings on their altars. This, 
of course, the Romans would not allow, and, you 
will agree, they were quite right, just as the English 
in India were quite right to prevent widows being 
burnt alive on the graves of their dead husbands. 
Nevertheless, when the Romans began to interfere 
with the religion of the Gauls, the people, who 
before had been quite content to obey Roman laws, 
rose in revolt against their conquerors and the war 
[ 22 ] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ROMANS 

began over again. The revolt was a failure, and it 
only led to a large number of men being killed and 
to more suffering and destruction. 

This revolt happened after Julius Caesar had 
died, and when the Roman Empire was governed 
by other Emperors who were less wise and less 
sympathetic than he had been. They took away 
from the Gauls their privileges as Roman citizens 
and made them just serfs who had to do exactly as 
they were told by their conquerors. Later on, Rome 
was ruled by Emperors, who went back to Caesar’s 
policy and restored to the Gauls and the Britons 
all that Caesar had given to them. One of these 
Emperors vastly preferred France to Rome itself, 
and for some years the French city of Lyons, which 
the Romans had built, almost became the capital of 
the Roman Empire, instead of Rome. 

I want you particularly to remember all this 
because I am going to try and show you in the 
chapters that follow that France is the child of the 
Roman Empire just as you are the children of your 
fathers, and that therefore France inherits the 
qualities of the Roman Empire just as you inherit 
the qualities of your fathers. 

Even those Roman Emperors who were most 
sympathetic to the Gauls and the Britons were very 
much opposed to the Druidical religion, and in the 

[ 23 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

time of Nero (who was one of these Roman 
Emperors) the Druids were driven out of France 
into Britain and then away to the little island of 
Anglesey, off the north-west coast of Wales, and 
in the year a.d. 61 the Roman soldiers killed all the 
Druid priests and priestesses. It was after this 
massacre that the Britons revolted against the 
Romans, under their Queen Boadicea, whose statue 
you can see on the Thames Embankment in Lon¬ 
don. Although in many respects he was a very 
wicked man, Nero was extremely fond of the 
Gauls. He realized how useful the Roman roads 
had been to them, and he thought that even more 
good would come if he were to make canals in the 
country so that the people could travel by water 
from one place to another. He therefore planned 
to construct a great canal which should join the 
Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. If you will 
look at the map, you will see what a splendid idea 
this was, but, unfortunately, Nero was never able 
to carry it out. 

Gaul continued to receive many benefits from 
Rome, even during the reigns of the worst Emper¬ 
ors, and all the time the laws were being improved 
so that the common men were able to live in peace 
and to know that they would be treated fairly and 
justly. Some of the Gauls continued to have high 
[24] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ROMANS 

places in the Roman Empire, and to take their part 
in the government as well as in the worlds of liter¬ 
ature and art. The great idea of equality which 
we, people who live in the modern world, owe to 
France, France learned long ago from the Romans. 

During the time that Gaul was ruled by the 
Roman Emperors, Christianity first entered the 
country. It was in the year a.d. 177 that the first 
Gauls were baptized. In those days the Roman 
Emperors persecuted the Christians and soon after 
this year (a.d. 177) forty-seven Gauls became the 
first Christian martyrs in their country. By the 
year a.d. 250 there were seven Christian bishops in 
Gaul, one of them being the Bishop of Paris. 
Christianity, of course, came into Gaul after it had 
made many converts in Rome and in Italy. I 
ought to tell you (particularly as I have already 
said that every nation is the descendant of a large 
number of other nations, just as we are the descen¬ 
dants of many grandfathers and great-great-grand¬ 
fathers), that it was the Greeks who really taught 
Christianity to the Gauls, and that the Church at 
Lyons was founded by Greek missionaries. It is 
interesting to remember that it was from France 
that missionaries were sent to convert the Irish to 
Christianity. From this you will see how much one 
nation owes to another, and how in every important 

[25] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

happening in history, we can discover, behind all 
the quarrels of kings and the ambitions of emper¬ 
ors, the real brotherhood of man. Bear in mind 
this incident that I have just told you. The Greeks 
came from their own country to the city of Lyons 
in France, a city which the Romans built, to teach 
the people Christianity, and then some of these 
people, who had learned Christianity from the 
Greeks, journeyed all the way from Lyons to Ire¬ 
land to tell the story of Jesus Christ to the people 
there. 

About three hundred years after the death of 
Christ, during the reign of Constantine, the Roman 
Empire became definitely Christian, and after that 
Christianity was the recognized religion in all parts 
of the Roman Empire. This Empire included the 
whole of Italy, and France, and Spain, most of 
England, the whole of Greece and Asia Minor and 
Northern Africa. It was inhabited by many differ¬ 
ent races, who all spoke their own languages, but 
naturally, in every part of the Roman Empire, 
many people also spoke Latin. Therefore, in all 
those countries which used to belong to the Romans, 
the languages nowadays contain very many Latin 
words. We who speak English use many words 
that came originally from the Romans, and the 
French language is much more Latin than ours. 

[ 26 ] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ROMANS 

If you will again look at a map of Europe, and 
draw a line round the countries that used to belong 
to the Roman Empire, you will see that outside the 
Empire there were the great countries that we call 
Germany and Austria, the northern countries, 
Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Holland, and the 
great country of Russia. In the time of the Roman 
Empire these countries were inhabited by peoples 
whom the Romans called “barbarians,” with whom 
they were constantly at war, but whom they never 
really conquered, although many of the barbarians 
were enlisted in the Roman army and fought on the 
side of the Romans in their wars. For reasons 
which it would take me too long to explain, the 
Roman Empire grew weaker and weaker until it 
split into two parts, and it was no longer compact 
and joined together as it had been in its earlier 
days. As Rome grew weaker, the barbarians grew 
stronger. They marched over the Roman boun¬ 
daries, defeated the Roman armies, conquered 
Roman provinces and settled in them. In the next 
chapter, I shall tell you how some of these barba¬ 
rians came to Gaul, and how they affected the 
history of France, 


[ 27 ] 


CHAPTER II 


THE DARK AGES 

I WANT you to remember, before you begin to 
read this chapter, that about four hundred 
years after the death of Jesus Christ, the 
country that we now call France was part of the 
Roman Empire, just as nowadays California and 
Virginia and Connecticut are part of the United 
States. There were, however, two great differences. 
Nearly all the people in California and Virginia 
and Connecticut to-day speak the English language 
and many of them belong to the English race. But 
the people in France, at the time about which I am 
writing, belonged to quite a different race to the 
Romans, although many Romans had settled in 
their country, and they still spoke their own lan¬ 
guage, though many of them had also learned to 
speak Latin. There was another difference. Cali¬ 
fornia and Virginia and Connecticut belong to the 
United States just because they want to belong to 
it. But the Roman Empire was held together by 
the power of the Roman armies, although, as I told 
[ 28 ] 


THE DARK AGES 

you in the last chapter, it was really a very good 
thing for France and Britain to be in the Roman 
Empire, and although men from almost every coun¬ 
try in the world were to be found in the ranks of the 
Roman army. Now, I am sure you will understand 
that, if an Empire is held together by the power of 
an army, it must fall to pieces when that army 
grows weak and is no longer able to defeat the 
Empire’s enemies. And that is exactly what hap¬ 
pened to the Roman Empire about four hundred 
years after the death of Jesus Christ. 

At the end of my first chapter I told you that 
in the middle and the northern parts of Europe 
there were a number of powerful tribes whom the 
Romans called barbarians and whom they never 
succeeded in conquering. These tribes belonged to 
the German or Teutonic race. They were very 
warlike, and, as the Roman Empire grew weaker, 
they began to march across the frontiers and invade 
Roman territory. The first of these German tribes 
to defeat the Roman armies were the Goths, and 
these Goths were so successful that they penetrated 
right into Spain and Italy, and some of their chiefs 
actually became Emperors of Rome. One tribe of 
Goths settled in the south part of France between 
the river Garonne and the Pyrenees. If you look 
at the map you will see exactly where this district 

[ 29 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

is. In the Roman days it was called Aquitania, 
and afterwards in the Middle Ages it was called 
Aquitaine. I have already told you that the peo¬ 
ples, whom the Romans conquered, soon learned 
what a splendid thing Roman law was, and it is a 
very interesting fact that these Goths, who con¬ 
quered the Romans, also learned to appreciate 
Roman law. They found it was a good thing to 
pay for the things they wanted and to behave justly 
to the people who lived in the country before they 
settled there. One man who lived in Aquitania left 
his estates and ran away to the city of Marseilles 
when the Goths invaded the country, and he was 
very surprised soon afterwards to receive payment 
for his estates from the Goth who had taken them 
over. 

Soon after these German Goths had settled in 
Aquitania, another German tribe, called the Bur¬ 
gundians, settled in the east part of France, west 
of the Jura mountains (you will of course look at 
your map again), in the province that is still called 
Burgundy, and of which Dijon is nowadays the 
principal town. These Burgundians were very 
good-natured people, and they also behaved kindly 
and fairly to the Gauls. So by about the year a.d. 
416 there were Goths in the south and Burgundians 
in the east, and Gauls with some Roman settlers 
[30] 



CORONATION OF CHARLEMAGNE 


H. Levis ( Pantheon ) 




THE DARK AGES 

and governors in the middle of France and the 
west. Meanwhile another German tribe, called the 
Franks, had settled in the northern part of France 
and in the country which we now call Belgium, in, 
that is, the district of Flanders in which so much 
terrible fighting took place during the Great War. 

Now, let us go back a little. In the first chapter 
I tried to show you that the early story of England 
and the early story of France are very much alike. 
At the beginning both countries were conquered 
by the Romans and became parts of the Roman 
Empire. When the Roman Empire broke up, 
again exactly the same thing happened to the two 
countries. The Roman Emperors were obliged to 
recall their soldiers from Britain in order that they 
might fight against the invading barbarians in 
Italy. When the Roman soldiers had gone, the 
Britons had no one to defend them against the Piets 
and the Scots who lived in Scotland, and they asked 
the Angles and the Saxons, two of the barbarian 
German tribes, to come to their help. The Angles 
and the Saxons landed in Britain and never went 
home again. The Britons were soon driven into 
Wales and Cornwall, and the Anglo-Saxons be¬ 
came masters of the country. In France the Gauls 
also found themselves helpless against their ene¬ 
mies, and they asked the Franks, who were of the 

[31] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

same race as the Angles and the Saxons, to march 
southwards through Flanders for their protection. 

Now while the Roman Empire lasted, the 
Roman Emperor had been the link between the 
various peoples that made up the Empire, prevent¬ 
ing war between them and making them realize 
that peoples who spoke different languages were 
really first cousins. As the power of the Roman 
Emperors grew less, the power of the Christian 
Church grew stronger. From the very beginning 
of their invasion of the centre part of France, the 
Franks became faithful members of the Christian 
Church and allied themselves with its bishops and 
its priests. You will understand that when the 
Roman soldiers went away and tribes began once 
more to fight against tribes, the power of the 
law began to disappear and the poor man had 
nowhere to look for justice or protection. But 
Clovis, the leader of the Frankish invaders, gave 
the Church the right of asylum and protection. 
Poor and weak men, who were persecuted by the 
rich and the strong, were able to take refuge in the 
churches, and no one could touch them there. This 
was a very important thing, and you will see how 
important it was as I go on with my story. King 
Clovis, who is sometimes called the first King of 
France, conquered practically the whole of the 
[ 32 ] 


THE DARK AGES 


country from Flanders to the Mediterranean and 
the Pyrenees, and from what we now call Alsace- 
Lorraine to the Mediterranean. 

One rather important thing happened before 
France fell under the sway of the Franks, from 
whom, of course, it gets its modern name. I dare 
say you remember that during the Great War the 
Germans were sometimes called Huns. The real 
Huns were wild, savage men from the eastern bor¬ 
ders of Europe who overran the continent under 
their great leader Attila, during the days when the 
Roman Empire was growing weaker and weaker. 
Attila with his Huns and many German allies 
marched into France, but he was opposed by an 
army that consisted of Gauls, Burgundians and 
Goths, all the peoples, that is, who lived in France 
at the time, and he was defeated near the town of 
Chaalons, which was for a long time the headquar¬ 
ters of the French army during the Great War. I 
am telling you this fact because I want you to see 
that even before the Franks came into France, the 
different races who lived there, joined together like 
one nation when they were faced with very great 
danger. 

Now we will go back to Clovis, the first Frank 
King. He made Paris his capital and died in the 
year 511. For many years after his death the 

[ 33 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

condition of the country was very dreadful. The 
Frank kings took Romans and Gauls for their 
ministers, and sometimes tried hard to restore 
Roman law and to give the people justice, but gen¬ 
erally there was nothing but fighting and quarrels 
between different chieftains, and the order, which 
had existed during the Roman period, gave place 
to perpetual disorder. However, during all these 
troubles, the power of the Church was ever grow¬ 
ing stronger, and the half-savage kings and chiefs 
were compelled to submit to the bishops and priests, 
and at least to behave much better than they would 
have done if they had been left quite alone. Very 
poor men often rose to be bishops, and they 
naturally were particularly anxious to do all they 
could for other poor men who were very likely their 
own brothers and cousins. At this time, the most 
important bishop in France was the Archbishop of 
Rheims, and this is an interesting fact to remember 
because, as my story goes on, you will discover what 
a large part the town of Rheims has played in the 
history of France and the French. 

The next great man with whom we are concerned 
was called Charles Martel. Martel means the 
hammer, and it was Charles Martel’s work to try 
to hammer the various parts of France and the 
various races who lived there into one nation. He 
[34] 


THE DARK AGES 


did not quite succeed, but his hammering did no 
end of good. Until the time of Charles Martel, the 
German tribes, who lived on the east side of the 
river Rhine and were constantly invading France, 
were still pagans, and it was thought that there 
would be a much greater chance for peace if these 
tribes could be persuaded to become Christians. It 
was difficult to find the right missionary to preach 
to the barbarians, and it is interesting to know that 
the missionary, whom the Pope finally sent, and 
who succeeded in persuading the German barba¬ 
rians to embrace Christianity, was an Englishman 
born in Devonshire, and called St. Boniface. 
Charles Martel, like Clovis two hundred years be¬ 
fore him, was the ally of the bishops and was always 
backed by the power of the Church. Charles Mar¬ 
tel did one very great thing for France, for Europe, 
and for the Christian religion. The warlike tribes 
of Asia and Northern Africa, who followed the 
religion of the Prophet Mahomet, conquered coun¬ 
try after country after the fall of the Roman 
Empire. They crossed from Africa to Spain and 
overran the whole of that country, and it must have 
seemed at one time that they would conquer the 
whole of Europe, and that they would compel the 
peoples of Europe to adopt the religion of 
Mahomet and give up the religion of Jesus Christ. 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

At the beginning of the eighth century, they 
crossed the Pyrenees and invaded France, but 
Charles Martel gathered a large army together, 
utterly routed them near the town of Tours, and 
drove them back again across the Pyrenees. Since 
then, there has been no danger of the Mohamme¬ 
dans conquering western Europe, although they 
remained in Spain for another seven hundred years. 

Charles Martel’s grandson, the great Charle¬ 
magne, not only established his power all through 
France, but conquered the northern part of Italy, 
parts of Spain, and a large part of Germany. He 
made his capital at Aix-la-Chapelle, where the 
ex-Kaiser Wilhelm had his headquarters during 
the Great War. His power was so great that the 
Pope thought that Charlemagne would revive the 
old Roman Empire and that the power of this 
Empire might once more give Europe peace. So 
he crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West. 
Although Charlemagne was King of France, and 
although the Franks had in his time been in France 
for nearly four hundred years, he always spoke the 
German language and always wore German dress. 
While he lived, he was certainly the greatest king 
in the world. The Saxon Kings of England came 
to live at his Court, and ambassadors from far¬ 
away countries continually visited him. One of 
[36] 


THE DARK AGES 

these ambassadors came from the famous Haroun 
al Raschid, the Caliph of Bagdad, about whom I 
dare say you have read in the Arabian Nights . 
This ambassador brought Charlemagne as presents 
from his master a clock that struck the hours, an 
ape and an elephant, and you can still see one of the 
teeth of this elephant if you go to Aix-la-Chapelle. 
Perhaps the most wonderful thing about Charle¬ 
magne was that he could write, which hardly any 
one could do in his time, except the bishops and the 
priests. 

Charlemagne’s empire quickly broke into pieces 
after his death. His son, Louis the Debonnaire, 
was a very kind, gentle king, far too merciful to 
force obedience from the turbulent chiefs with 
whom he had to deal. His successors were equally 
powerless. The countries that Charlemagne had 
conquered once more became independent, and the 
condition of France and the French was once again 
very sad and pitiful. Happily for France, how¬ 
ever, there was a very strong, clever Archbishop at 
Rheims, and he did a great deal to curb the disorder 
and lawlessness of the country. However, the 
other priests and bishops were not as clever and 
powerful as this Archbishop of Rheims, and France 
was in a very weak, almost helpless, condition when 
the next great event in her history occurred. 

[37] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

I have told you about the coming of the Romans 
and the invasions of the three German tribes, the 
Goths, the Burgundians and the Franks. One 
more people was to settle in France before the race 
* which we now call the French was made complete. 
This people was the Normans. Norman means 
Northman, and these Normans were sea pirates 
very much like the Danes, who continually invaded 
England and who settled in Suffolk and Norfolk. 
At first the Normans attacked the French coast, 
burnt the villages and made slaves of the people. 
But after a bit they settled in the country, round 
the mouth of the Seine (look at the map again), 
which we now call Normandy, and which contains 
the towns of Dieppe, Havre and Rouen. Their 
chief, Rollo, was baptized, and the Normans who, 
a hundred and fifty years afterwards, were to 
invade England, settled down in France. 

The descendants of Charlemagne were still the 
kings but they were never able really to govern, and 
the power of the Church, although always very 
great, was not equally great throughout the whole 
country, and the condition of the poor people was 
for the most part very unhappy. At last, in the 
year a.d. 987, nearly a thousand years after the 
death of Jesus Christ, the crown was taken away 
from the descendants of Charlemagne by a power- 


THE DARK AGES 

ful chief called Hugues Capet. Hugues Capet 
was the grandson of a peasant who afterwards 
became Count of Paris, and it was his own power¬ 
ful character that made him King of France. He 
was, indeed, the first real French king of the coun¬ 
try, because Charlemagne’s descendants were 
always really Germans. It was not, indeed, until 
nearly the end of their time that the French lan¬ 
guage, made up as it was of words borrowed from 
the Gauls, from the Romans, from the Goths, from 
the Greeks, from the Burgundians and from the 
Franks, began to be spoken at all. I suppose you 
will understand that the thing that really binds 
together the people of the same nation is that they 
all speak the same language. It is very difficult to 
understand people, to know and to like them, unless 
we can talk to them; and language, therefore, is a 
most important thing in creating that feeling of 
brotherhood without which there never can be a 
happy world. It is very interesting for us to know 
that the first time the French language was spoken 
in public was when King Charles the Bald, the 
grandson of Charlemagne, took his oath as sover¬ 
eign in the year 843. 

The beginning of the reign of Hugues Capet is 
an important event, and appropriately brings this 
chapter to an end. Before him the Kings of France 

[39] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

had been conquerors. They were German Franks, 
not French men, just as William the Conqueror 
was a French King reigning as a conqueror in 
England, and years afterwards George I was a 
German King ruling in England. People naturally 
prefer to be ruled by a man of their own race, and 
this first French King is a sign that by the year 
a.d. 1000 France was no longer peopled by differ¬ 
ent races, but that henceforward it was the home 
of the French. 

Once more let me ask you to recollect that 
exactly this same thing happened in England, 
which was first of all the home of the Celtic Britons, 
then of the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes and then 
of the Normans. Then all the races joined together 
and became the English nation, and the English 
language was made from words borrowed from the 
different tongues of the various peoples who had 
made England their home. I am very anxious that 
you should understand how closely the English and 
the French are related. Both peoples in their ori¬ 
gin are partly Celtic and partly German, though 
as I have told you before, the French are also 
descended partly from the Romans, and the 
English are not. 

The centuries with which we have been concerned 
in this chapter were, on the whole, very sad and 
[40] 


THE DARK AGES 

dark. There was so much fighting and so much 
disorder that men had no time to write poems or to 
paint pictures as they had done years before in 
Greece and in Rome. But men were still reading 
books in the monasteries, and outside the monas¬ 
teries men were building churches and saying their 
prayers. So that even in the darkest days there 
was something going on all the time that showed 
that, despite all the cruelty and the disorder and 
the fighting, men realized that there were better 
things for them to do if they only had the 
opportunity. 


[41] 


CHAPTER III 

FRANCE AND THE CRUSADES 


S OME years before a.d. 1000, what was called 
the Feudal System had been established in 
France. The king said that he owned all the 
land in the country. Of course he could not look 
after it all himself, so he divided it up among his 
great nobles, giving a large share to every one of 
them. These great lords had to pay rent to him. 
The rent was not often paid in money, but, when 
the king went to war, each one of the great lords 
had to provide him with a certain number of sol¬ 
diers in payment for the land which he held. In 
their turn the great lords divided up their land into 
smaller portions, which they gave up to their vas¬ 
sals, who had to supply them with money or per¬ 
haps with food, and who had to send their sons to 
fight whenever the great lords called for them. 
Then there were other people who had no land at 
all. They were called serfs. They had to work 
and fight just as they were told by the vassals 
or by the great lord, and they were really little 
more than slaves. One good thing that came 
from the Feudal System was what was called 
[42] 


FRANCE AND THE CRUSADES 

“chivalry.” “Chivalry” means knightliness. The 
knight was a follower of the great lord or the king. 
He took an oath always to do his duty, always to 
fight for God, for women and for the weak, always 
to speak the truth and always to be courteous to 
every one. If you read Sir Walter Scott’s great 
novel Ivanhoe you will learn how well some of 
these old knights fulfilled all the obligations of 
chivalry and what splendid fellows they were. 
Chivalry, as I have said, was a good result of the 
Feudal System, but there were many very bad 
results. One of these bad results was that the great 
lords, to whom the king had given the land, grew so 
rich and so powerful that they often thought them¬ 
selves quite equal to the king. When he sent his 
orders to them and told them to send their men to 
fight on his side, they very often refused to obey 
and sometimes fought against the king instead of 
fighting for him. So you will see that, in the same 
country, instead of there being one strong king, 
there were a number of little kings and armies and 
castles of their own and able to do just what they 
liked. Fighting went on almost all the time, and 
the poor people often had their houses burned 
down and the corn in their fields destroyed. France 
was thus much more unhappy under the Feudal 
System than it had been years before when people 

[43] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
obeyed the Roman law and there were justice and 
fair play for everybody. 

Of all the great lords who lived in France at the 
time about which I am writing (you will remember 
the date is a.d. 1000), the Normans (although they 
were the last comers to France) were the most 
powerful. Indeed, it was by the help of the Nor¬ 
mans that Hugues Capet was able to make himself 
King of France. The Normans were a very rest¬ 
less people and very fond of fighting. They hated 
stopping quietly at home and they loved to go wan¬ 
dering about the world, searching for adventure. 
They could not get very many adventures in 
France itself, because there were too many other 
great lords there with their armies and their castles. 
So they first of all went right away to the south of 
Italy and conquered the island of Sicily, which 
belonged to the Saracens, the people who had come 
from the north of Africa and who followed the 
religion of Mahomet. Then, in the year 1066, the 
Normans sailed across the English Channel to 
England, conquered the Anglo-Saxons in a battle 
just outside the town of Hastings, and made their 
leader, William the Conqueror, the first Norman 
King of England. 

In the year a.d. 1000 the people of France suf¬ 
fered many dreadful misfortunes. A fearful pes- 
[44] 


FRANCE AND THE CRUSADES 

tilence broke out in the south, and the flesh of the 
poor people who were taken ill fell off their bones 
just as if it had been struck by fire. Thousands 
and thousands of them died, and while this pesti¬ 
lence was raging, a great famine fell on the land 
and thousands more died through sheer starvation. 
When people are very miserable they frequently 
think much more about God than they do when 
they are very happy, and the people of France, in 
these dreadful years, filled the churches and re¬ 
pented of their sins. Many of them thought it 
would please God if they were to take the long 
journey to Palestine, the country in which Jesus 
Christ had lived, and were to say their prayers in 
Jerusalem. At this time the King of France was 
Robert II, called the Wise, a good and pious man, 
kind to the poor and never thinking selfishly of 
himself. I have read the following story about King 
Robert in a very old book, written hundreds and 
hundreds of years ago: 

“One night as he was supping in one of his cas¬ 
tles, he ordered the gate to be opened to all the 
poor. One of them stationed himself at the king’s 
feet, who fed him under the table. But the man, 
not forgetting to take care of himself, cut off with 
a knife a golden ornament six ounces weight which 
hung from the king’s knee and made off as quickly 

[45] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

as possible. On rising from the table, the queen 
perceived her lord to be despoiled, and giving way 
to her passion, assailed the holy man with violent 
words. ‘What enemy of God, my good lord, has 
dishonoured your gold-adorned robe?’ ‘No one/ 
he replied, ‘has dishonoured me; undoubtedly he 
who took it wanted it more than I, and with God to 
aid, it will be of service to him/ ” 

This good King Robert encouraged his subjects 
in their repentance and in their pilgrimages to the 
Holy Land. The Holy Land, however, and the 
city of Jerusalem belonged to the Saracens, who 
persecuted the Christian pilgrims and, sometimes 
put them to death. One of these pilgrims was 
called Peter the Hermit. He was born in the town 
of Amiens, which was one of the headquarters of 
the British Army in the Great War, and was very 
nearly destroyed by the Germans. Peter went on a 
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and he was very angry 
when he saw the way in which the Saracens op¬ 
pressed the Christians. He felt that the city of 
Christ ought to belong to people who believed in 
the religion which Christ taught. So when he came 
back from the Holy Land, he went to Rome to ask 
the Pope to call on all the Christian people in 
Europe, the kings and the great lords and the 
knights and the common people, to join together 
[ 46 ] 


THE MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR 














FRANCE AND THE CRUSADES 
and make a great army to capture Jerusalem from 
the Saracens and to make the Holy City a Christian 
city. The Pope, who was called Urban II, was 
himself a Frenchman. He was born at Rheims, 
and you will remember that I have told you what 
an important place Rheims is in the history of 
France. As Peter the Hermit and the Pope were 
both French, they, of course, were able to talk to 
each other quite easily, and the Pope was very much 
moved by what Peter told him, and promised to 
help him. 

In the year 1095 the Pope left Rome and went 
from Italy into France to the town of Clermont, 
where he held a great council of bishops and priests 
and knights. When the council was over, the Pope 
preached a splendid sermon in French, telling the 
knights that it was their duty to fight, and if needs 
be to die, in order to win Jerusalem from the Sara¬ 
cens. This sermon had a great effect on the people 
who heard it, and a number of the great lords at 
once said that they would take their vassals and 
march to the Holy Land. While the Pope was 
preaching to these great men in the south of France 
Peter the Hermit was going from village to village 
in the north of France preaching to the poor people 
and telling them that they, too, ought to fight for 
Jerusalem. About Easter time, in the year 1096 , 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


Peter started the long journey across Europe to 
Palestine (if you look at a map you will see what 
a long, long journey it was) with fifteen thousand 
French pilgrims, all of them poor men, who had 
willingly left behind all they possessed, because 
they thought it was their duty to rescue the city of 
Christ from His enemies. 

I have not time to tell you the whole story of the 
Crusades. That story would fill a big book all by 
itself and one day I hope you will read it. The 
First Crusade, which was begun by Peter the Her¬ 
mit and Pope Urban II, was followed by seven 
other Crusades, and for nearly two hundred years 
the Christian people in Europe tried to make Jeru¬ 
salem a Christian city. They captured Jerusalem 
and lost it again, but they felt that they must keep 
pn trying to win it and keep it. Even if, in the 
end, they failed, it was a very splendid thing that 
they tried to do, and the Crusades, and particularly 
the First Crusade, were very important events in 
the history of France and in the history of Europe. 

I want you to remember that the First Crusade 
was led by Frenchmen, and that there were many 
more Frenchmen in the ranks of the crusading 
army than any other nation. When you have 
finished reading this little book, I hope you will 
have learned that the French have often led the rest 
[ 48 ] 


FRANCE AND THE CRUSADES 

of Europe in many good and wonderful actions. 
The First Crusade was one of them. The poor 
people who tramped across Europe with Peter the 
Hermit and the knights and the lords who went to 
Palestine with Godfrey de Bouillon and other 
French nobles did not go to seek money or for any 
other selfish reason. They just went because they 
thought it was their duty to suffer, and even to die, 
to rescue the Holy City. Moreover, although the 
French were the leaders, every other nation in 
Europe sent some of its people with the French. 
You may perhaps have heard that since the Great 
War, a League of Nations has been formed in order 
to make other great wars impossible. The First 
Crusade was a League of Christian Nations formed 
to fight the common enemy of all Christian nations. 

The French king himself did not go to the Holy 
Land with the First Crusaders, and while the great 
lords were away from home his power became much 
greater than it had been before. The great lords 
with their armies of fighting men had terrorized the 
people who lived in the towns near their castles. 
The merchants and the shopkeepers lived in a state 
of constant fear. When the lords and their knights 
and their men at arms had marched away, and when 
the merchants knew that they could not possibly be 
back for months and months, they became quite 

[ 49 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

bold and began themselves to govern their cities 
and the country near the cities. So on account of 
the Crusades, the power of the king and the power 
of the merchants both became much greater, and 
the power of the barons and the knights became 
much less. 

I have told you that there were eight Crusades. 
The French carried through the First Crusade 
almost single-handed. Germany helped very much 
in the Second Crusade, and in the Third Crusade 
the English King, Richard Coeur de Lion, who 
although he was King of England was really a 
Frenchman and always spoke French, was one of 
the great leaders. Unfortunately, after a little 
while men were not content merely to go on Cru¬ 
sades against the Saracens, and in order to capture 
Jerusalem from unbelievers. They also made 
fierce onslaughts on other Christians who did not 
worship God in exactly the same way as they did 
themselves. One of these Christian sets was called 
the Albigenses, and they lived in the south of 
France round about the town of Toulouse. They 
were practically destroyed by other Frenchmen, led 
by a great lord called Simon de Montfort, about the 
year 1212. I tell you this incident particularly 
because it again shows what near relations the 
English and the French are, for this Simon de 
[ 50 ] 


FRANCE AND THE CRUSADES 

Montfort had a son who was called by the same 
name as his father. The son went to England, and 
he was one of the great English lords who forced 
King John to sign Magna Charta at Runnymede, 
an island on the Thames near Windsor, in the 
year 1215. 

The end of the story of the Crusades, so far as 
we are concerned in this book, comes with the reign 
of the French King Louis IX, who, on account of 
his splendid character and good deeds, is always 
remembered as St. Louis. When King Louis came 
to the throne, the power of the great lords had been 
partly broken, and nearly the whole country ac¬ 
knowledged the authority of the king. Paris had 
become a great city with a cathedral, a university, 
markets and hospitals, and altogether France was 
a very different place from the poor, distracted, 
disunited country that it had been at the time about 
which I wrote at the beginning of this chapter. 
Louis was perhaps the most religious king who 
ever lived. It has been said that his whole life was 
a prayer. He frequently washed the feet of the 
poor in imitation of Our Lord, and he himself went 
into the towns and villages to see that justice was 
done. It made St. Louis very sad to think that, 
despite all the bravery of the Christian knights and 
all the preaching of Peter the Hermit and St. 

[51] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


Bernard and other good priests, Jerusalem still 
remained in the hands of the Saracens. Two 
hundred years had gone by since Peter the Hermit 
had gathered together his army of fifteen thousand 
pilgrims. Thousands and thousands of Christians 
had died, and still the Holy City belonged to the 
followers of Mahomet. So St. Louis thought that 
he must, at all costs, make one more effort to win 
back Jerusalem. As a matter of fact, St. Louis 
led two Crusades. In the first, which is known as 
the Seventh Crusade, the French were defeated by 
the Saracens in Egypt and St. Louis was taken 
prisoner, and had to pay a great ransom for his 
release. Sixteen years later, he started on the 
Eighth Crusade. This time he got only as far as 
Tunis, a town on the north coast of Africa, which 
now belongs to the French, where he was taken ill 
with dysentery and died. With the death of St. 
Louis, the French dream of the united Christian 
peoples fighting under the leadership of France 
for a great Christian object came to an end. It 
was only a dream, but it was a very beautiful dream, 
and as you grow older you will learn that nations, 
as well as men, are made splendid not by the 
money they own, not by their possessions, not even 
by their cleverness, but by the beauty of the dreams 
that they dream. 

[ 52 ] 


FRANCE AND THE CRUSADES 

I am sure you must have heard how the Ger¬ 
mans, during the Great War, destroyed with shells 
fired from their guns, the beautiful cathedral at 
Rheims, and I am sure, too, that you must have 
heard your fathers and mothers say what a wicked 
and abominable thing the destruction was. France, 
like England, is made beautiful by a number of 
wonderful cathedrals. England has cathedrals at 
Salisbury and Ely and Winchester and Canter¬ 
bury and many other towns. The French have 
their cathedrals at Rheims and Paris and Amiens 
and Chartres and other places. Now I want you 
to remember that all these cathedrals were built 
during the centuries when men were going on Cru¬ 
sades to Palestine. Some men you see showed 
their love of God by marching far away and risk¬ 
ing death in big battles while other men stayed at 
home—the masons and the artists, and the glass- 
workers, and the wood-workers and the painters— 
and showed their love of God by making in His 
honour beautiful buildings which are still the most 
beautiful buildings in the world. And you will 
see that both in the Crusades and in the building of 
the cathedrals a fine thing was done, not by men 
selfishly thinking about themselves and about their 
own work or about their own wages, but by men 
working together and helping each other. 


CHAPTER IV 

THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH 

S T. LOUIS died in the year 1270, and his death 
was really the last important thing that hap¬ 
pened in France in the thirteenth century. 
For the next seventy years, nothing occurred that 
you need remember. One king followed another. 
Some of them tried to make the people happier and 
to see that justice was done in the land. Others were 
weak and allowed the great lords to grow in power 
and to oppress the poor. So our story goes on 
until the year 1340. Then for nearly a hundred 
years the story of France and the story of England 
are almost the same story. In 1340, Edward III 
had been King of England for thirteen years. 
Unlike most kings, he was a very clever man and, 
during his reign, England grew richer and more 
powerful than she had ever been before. He con¬ 
quered the Scotch. He encouraged trade, inviting 
clever people to come from Holland to live in Eng¬ 
land and start factories, and at the same time, he 
encouraged English sailors to take their ships to 
Holland and to Spain and into the Mediterranean, 
parrying English wool and bringing back from 

m 


THE MORNING OF THE BATTLE OF AGINCOURT,” 1415 



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THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH 

foreign ports various things that the English 
wanted. 

I told you in the last chapter that the Norman 
kings of England and the great lords who came 
with them from France always spoke French, and 
for a long time after the Normans had conquered 
England there were two languages in the country. 
The rich spoke French, and the poor people still 
went on speaking the Anglo-Saxon language. 
The Norman kings of England were followed by 
the Plantagenets. They were also Frenchmen and 
they originally came from the province of France 
called Anjou. Anjou was a small province south 
of Normandy and north of the river Loire. These 
Plantagenets also spoke French, but by the time 
that Edward III became king, the two languages, 
French and Anglo-Saxon, had joined together. 
Some words were taken from one and some words 
were taken from the other and a new language was 
made which was called English and which has 
been spoken in England ever since. It was in 
Edward Ill’s reign that the great English poet, 
Chaucer, wrote his Canterbury Tales. I hope you 
will read the Canterbury Tales one of these days. 
When you do, you will find that though Chaucer 
uses some words that we do not use, it is quite easy 
for us to understand what he has written, and you 

[55] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

will realize that his poems are English, just as 
English as the poems of Shelley or of Tennyson, 
who wrote hundreds of years after Chaucer died. 

In this chapter I am going to tell you about the 
wars that took place between the English and the 
French during the fourteenth and part of the fif¬ 
teenth centuries, and I want you to understand 
that by this time the English and the French had 
become distinct peoples speaking entirely different 
languages. Now, of course, you will ask why these 
two nations, the English on one side of the English 
Channel and the French on the other side, should 
have fought and have killed each other, and I shall 
have to tell you that neither the English people 
nor the French people wanted to fight, and it is 
quite certain that hardly any of the soldiers knew 
what they were fighting for. Edward III was a 
clever man, and clever men do not fight without a 
reason or just for the fun of the thing. He said 
that he was really King of France as well as King 
of England. As a matter of fact, he had not the 
smallest right to call himself King of France and 
he was much too clever to believe that he had any 
right. But he wanted an excuse for sending his 
soldiers to fight against the French, and this was 
the rather silly excuse that he found. 

As you grow up you will learn that when men 
[56] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH 


want to do bad actions they can always find good 
excuses for them. Edward said that at least parts 
of France belonged to him—Normandy and Anjou 
and Guienne, a province in the south of France 
bordering on the Mediterranean. But the real rea¬ 
son for Edward’s desire to fight the French was 
that he wanted to preserve and increase the trade 
of England. The French kings were jealous of 
England’s growing prosperity. They had helped 
the Scotch to fight against the English and they 
continually sent ships into the English Channel 
to capture the English ships that were carrying 
wool away from England and bringing back foreign 
merchandise. That was Edward’s real reason for 
making war and it would have been far better if 
he had said so, because, by pretending that he was 
King of France, he filled the minds of the other 
kings, who came after him, and who were not as 
clever as he was, with vain and foolish ambition, so 
that wars went on and thousands of people were 
killed who might never have been killed if Edward 
III had told the truth. 

Edward landed with his army at La Hogue, at 
the mouth of the river Seine, in the year 1346. 
Part of his army consisted of foot soldiers enlisted 
in Ireland and Wales, but the greater part were 
English archers, stalwart men who could shoot 

[ 57 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

their deadly arrows with great strength and ac¬ 
curacy. You can read all about these men in Sir 
Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and you will learn from 
that book what splendid fellows they were. The 
English army attacked the French near the village 
of Crecy. Both sides fought very bravely and 
obstinately. On the English side King Edward’s 
son, who was called the Black Prince, held his 
own, although he was attacked most fiercely by the 
ejiemy; and on the French side the King of Bo¬ 
hemia, although he was quite blind, insisted that 
his friends should lead his horse into the battle in 
order that he might strike at least one good blow 
with his sword. Thanks almost entirely to the 
straight shooting of the English archers, the battle 
ended in a great victory for the English. This 
Battle of Crecy is really much more important 
than most battles have been because it was the first 
time that ordinary common men fought and beat 
knights in armour and great kings and lords. After 
the Battle of Crecy, King Edward and the Black 
Prince laid siege to the town of Calais. Edward 
particularly wanted to capture Calais because from 
its harbour—from which nowadays people start for 
Dover and London—the French ships used to come 
that captured the English ships in the English 
Channel. But Calais did not want to be captured 
[58] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH 

by the English. The people were very brave and 
very determined. They had no one to help them. 
The French king was unable to send soldiers to 
fight on their side, but yet, for one whole year, they 
held out against the English, and it was not 
until they were nearly all starving that they agreed ' 
to open their gates and let the English soldiers 
march in. Edward was very angry at being kept 
for a year outside Calais and he said that, although 
he would spare the people and the garrison of the 
town, six of the principal men must be delivered to 
him and that he would cut off their heads as a pun¬ 
ishment for the long resistance. You will see from 
this how war and ambition drive men to the most 
cruel actions. It was perfectly right of the people 
of Calais to resist the English, and you will feel, I 
am sure, how wicked it was of the English king to 
punish them for bravely doing their duty. The six 
citizens who had been chosen to die for the others 
came to King Edward, just wearing their shirts, 
with bare feet and with a rope round their necks 
and asked him to spare their lives. But the king 
refused. The English knights and lords urged the 
king to be merciful, but he told them to hold their 
tongues and to call the headsman. Then the Queen 
of England, who had gone across to France to join 
the king, knelt down before her husband, with all 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

the people looking on, and said to him: “Gentle 
Sire, from the day that I passed oversea in great 
peril, as you know, I have asked for nothing: now 
I pray and beseech you, with folded hands, for the 
love of Our Lady’s Son, to have mercy upon them.” 
King Edward could not refuse his wife’s prayer, 
and you will think that this good queen begging 
for the lives of the poor citizens of Calais was far 
more splendid than her husband when he was win¬ 
ning the Battle of Crecy. After the king had 
agreed that the citizens should not be beheaded, 
the queen brought clothes for them to wear and 
gave them food to eat and sent them back happy 
to their homes. 

After the Battle of Crecy, the poor people in 
the northern and central parts of France suffered 
from dreadful troubles. The King of France was 
so weak and so poor that he could not do anything 
to protect his subjects. He had no soldiers, and 
the towns and villages were constantly attacked 
by bands of thieves who plundered and killed the 
merchants, the farmers and the peasants. The 
south of France, however, was still happy and 
prosperous, and it is sad for us who are English¬ 
men to think that it was the English who also de¬ 
stroyed their happiness and prosperity. Fired by 
ambition, and I am sorry to say also by the desire 
[ 60 ] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH 

to plunder, which means the desire to steal things, 
the Black Prince led an army up the river Garonne 
destroying and stealing until “their horses were so 
laden with spoil that they could hardly move.” 
His army was attacked by the French at a place 
called Poitiers, and, again thanks to the archers, 
the English won the battle. The King of France 
was taken prisoner and carried away to London 
and the state of poor France became even worse 
than it had been before. The French soldiers, 
who had been beaten at Poitiers, formed themselves 
into little bands of robbers, wandering about the 
country and oppressing the people. The great 
lords, who had lost most of their money in the 
war, took from the poor people what the robbers 
had left. The English continued to send their 
armies through the land, burning and killing. One 
man who lived at this time has told us that “noth¬ 
ing presented itself to my eyes but a fearful soli¬ 
tude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated, houses 
in ruins. Even the neighbourhood of Paris shows 
everywhere marks of desolation and conflagration. 
The streets are deserted, the roads overgrown with 
weeds, the whole is a vast solitude.” Except for the 
fact that the French were no longer able to inter¬ 
fere with the English ships, Edward III really 
gained nothing from all the suffering that he had 

[ 61 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
inflicted on the French people. In the year 1360, 
he signed a treaty with the French king in which he 
admitted that he was not King of France at all 
and that he was not Duke of N ormandy. He kept, 
however, some of the French provinces as well as 
the town of Calais, and then he sailed home to Eng¬ 
land. 

Happily for France, in the year 1364 a new 
king called Charles the Wise ascended the throne. 
He was very patient and clever. He first cleared 
the country of the robbers who were oppressing the 
people by enlisting them as soldiers and sending 
them to fight in Spain. Then he encouraged those 
parts of France that still belonged to the King of 
England to revolt against their foreign rulers. 
You, of course, understand that the English are 
foreigners in France just as the French are for¬ 
eigners in England, and that it was quite as bad 
for Gascony and Aquitaine to belong to the Eng¬ 
lish king as it would have been for Kent and Dev¬ 
onshire to belong to the French king. The hatred 
of the English which Charles the Wise tried to en¬ 
courage was vastly increased by the Black Prince. 
He was in France again in 1370, and in that year 
he captured the town of Limoges. The Black 
Prince was very ill, too ill indeed to ride on his 
horse, and he had to be carried from place to place 
[62] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH 
on a litter. When Limoges was at last forced to 
surrender, he ordered all the men, women and 
children in the town, with the exception only of the 
bishop and three French knights, to be killed, and 
he was wicked enough to watch his soldiers while 
they were doing this dreadful thing. You will not 
wonder that, after this, the whole of France hated 
the very name of Englishmen, although the Eng¬ 
lish people really were not responsible for the 
wickedness of the Black Prince. 

The English armies went on invading France, 
one of them even got so far as the walls of Paris, 
but Charles the Wise forbade his soldiers to fight. 
“If a storm rages over the land,” he said, “it dis¬ 
perses itself, and so it will be with the English.” 
So indeed it was. By the end of the year 1377 
all that the English king owned in France were 
the towns of Calais, Bordeaux, and Bayonne. 
Thanks to Charles the Wise, France became much 
more happy and peaceful. But she had only a 
short rest from her troubles. The next king, 
Charles VI, lost his reason, and for the greater 
part of his reign was a poor madman unable to 
attend to business or to look after the affairs of his 
country. Two of his great nobles were eager to 
rule in the king’s name. One of them was his 
brother, the Duke of Orleans. The other was his 

[ 68 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


cousin, the Duke of Burgundy. Very soon these 
two dukes gathered armies together and began to 
fight each other. The Duke of Orleans was mur¬ 
dered by some of the servants of the Duke of Bur¬ 
gundy, but after his murder his party was led by his 
son, who was also called the Duke of Orleans, and 
the quarrel went on as before. Both of the parties 
looked to England for help. The English king 
at this time (1411) was Henry IV, another very 
shrewd king just as patient and far-seeing as 
Charles the Wise of France. He made promises 
to both of the two French dukes, and he once sent 
a small army across the Channel to help the Duke 
of Orleans, but that was all. When Henry IV 
died he was succeeded by his son Henry V, a brave 
reckless soldier who lives in English history as 
Harry of England, and about whom you can read 
in Shakespeare’s plays Henry IV and Henry V. 
Henry V really loved fighting for fighting’s sake, 
and he never stopped to think of the suffering that 
war brought to the poor and the weak. It seemed 
to him that the quarrels between the Duke of Bur¬ 
gundy and the Duke of Orleans, and the fact that 
the poor French king was mad, gave him a splendid 
opportunity for declaring that he, like Edward III, 
was really King of France, and for once more tak¬ 
ing an English army across the Channel. The 
[64] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH 

French did everything possible to prevent war 
starting again. They sent ambassadors to Eng¬ 
land and they offered King Henry French prov¬ 
inces and large sums of money, but the more they 
offered the more Henry asked, until at last the 
French Ambassador, though he was an archbishop, 
broke out into defiant speech and told the king that 
the offers he had made had not been made out of 
fear but in order to prevent the shedding of innocent 
blood. King Henry was not in the least affected 
by the archbishop’s bold words. He had made up 
his mind to invade France, and he went on with 
his preparations. In the year 1415, he landed in 
Normandy and captured the town of Harfleur. 
During the siege of Harfleur many of the English 
died of disease, and others were so ill that they 
had to be sent home to England. With the rest 
of his army Henry started the long march from 
Harfleur to Calais, a distance of over two hundred 
miles. During this march he encountered the 
French army at Agincourt on the river Somme. 
The Battle of Agincourt was fought on St. Cris¬ 
pin’s Day, and if you will read Shakespeare’s 
Henry V you will see that the great English poet 
has written a splendid speech for the king in which 
he says that St. Crispin’s Day will never be for¬ 
gotten by the English. Henry V was a fine gen- 

[65] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
eral, and his small army was very brave and deter¬ 
mined, and once more the English were successful, 
though I hope you will think that the king spoiled 
his victory by killing all his prisoners in cold blood 
after the battle was over. After his victory, Henry 
marched on to Calais and returned to England 
having gained really nothing from the St. Crispin’s 
Day victory. 

I particularly want you to notice that generally 
no good whatever was gained by either side from 
these battles in which so many brave men met their 
deaths and which were fought for nothing but the 
selfish ambition of kings. In the next year, Henry 
V went back again to France and gradually con¬ 
quered the whole of Normandy. The Duke of 
Burgundy had by this time got the poor mad 
French king entirely in his power, and he was very 
anxious to make friends with Henry. But all the 
Frenchmen, who loved France and wanted her to 
be free and strong and happy, and who hated the 
idea of a foreign king ruling their country and 
foreign soldiers oppressing the people, had gath¬ 
ered round the mad king’s eldest son who was 
called the Dauphin, and had collected an army in 
the south of France on the river Loire. But the 
Dauphin could do nothing against Henry, and in 
the year 1420 the mad king was compelled by the 
[ 66 ] 


THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH 

Duke of Burgundy to sign a treaty with Henry 
which was called the Treaty of Troyes. In this 
treaty it was agreed that Henry should marry the 
French king’s daughter Katharine, that Henry 
should be the next King of France, that he should 
govern the country during the poor mad king’s 
lifetime, and that in future England and France 
should always have the same king. More than 
half of the great men in France did not agree with 
this treaty and the common people would have all 
been against it if they had been asked. For the 
time it seemed that France and England were to be 
one nation. But Henry’s glory only lasted a very 
little time. Two years after the Treaty of Troyes 
he died, and his baby son Henry VI was crowned 
in Paris. In the next chapter I shall tell you how 
the English were finally driven out of France. 
Meanwhile there is one thing of great importance 
that happened, while the English and French were 
fighting each other, and which I must tell you be¬ 
fore I end this chapter. 

In all the wars and quarrels of the Middle Ages, 
it was very important for the various kings to try 
and get the Pope on their side, because, of course, 
the Pope had great influence in all the countries 
of Europe. So, the King of France always tried 
to have a French Pope while the Germans wanted 

[ 67 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

a German Pope and the Italians an Italian Pope. 
In the year 1309, a French Pope called Clement V, 
in order to please the French king, removed the 
Papal residence from Rome to the French town 
of Avignon, on the river Rhone. There the Popes 
stayed for seventy years and naturally, while they 
were at Avignon, they were all Frenchmen. But 
in the year 1377, St. Catherine of Sienna, a good 
and noble lady, persuaded the Pope that it was 
wrong for him to stop at Avignon and that he 
ought to go back to Rome. Pope Gregory XI 
was persuaded by St. Catherine, but after his death 
the French cardinals elected a Pope who lived at 
Avignon and the other cardinals elected another 
Pope who lived in Rome. The French and the 
Scotch and the Spaniards obeyed the Pope at 
Avignon, and the Italians and the Germans and 
the English obeyed the Pope at Rome. It was, 
of course, very bad that there should be two Popes 
and that the Church should be divided in this way, 
and in the year 1417 all the nations agreed that 
there should be only one Pope and that he should 
live in Rome. This was decided at a Council held 
at the town of Constance in Switzerland, and it is 
interesting to know that the two principal peace¬ 
makers were the Bishop of London and the Bishop 
of Winchester. 

[ 68 ] 


CHAPTER V 


JOAN OF AKC 

N EVER was a country more unhappy than 
France was when Henry V of England 
died. The whole of the northern part of 
the country was held by the English, and when 
the English king died, his brother, the Duke of 
Bedford, a good soldier and a clever man, ruled 
in Paris almost as if he were King of France. 
The old mad French king had died in the same 
year as Henry V. His son, who, you may re¬ 
member, was called the Dauphin, still had an 
army in the south of France, but the French 
kings had to be crowned at Rheims before they be¬ 
came real kings, and it was impossible for Charles 
VII, as he was called, to get to Rheims to be 
crowned because that town was held by his enemies, 
the English. The Duke of Bedford, indeed, was 
not content with holding the northern part of 
France, which his soldiers had turned almost into 
a desert; he thought it would be a good thing if he 
were to send his soldiers into the south as well. He 

[ 69 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

began by laying siege to the town of Orleans, which, 
you will see, if you again look at the map, stands 
on the river Loire. This river Loire is the bound¬ 
ary line between northern France and southern 
France. The Duke of Bedford thought that, if 
he could take Orleans, his soldiers could cross the 
Loire, that very soon he would destroy the army 
that remained with Charles VII, and that, then, 
the whole country would be his. The English had 
won so many victories in France, and the French 
were so disheartened and poor and unhappy, that 
men thought nothing could save France from be¬ 
ing completely overrun by her enemies. But when 
the king was helpless and the great men could do 
nothing, and the priests and the bishops had lost 
their faith, France was saved by a young girl, who 
had never been to school, whose father was a poor 
country labourer, and who must have seemed the 
very last person in the whole world to help her 
country in its time of bitter trouble. This young 
girl’s name was Joan of Arc, and the story of her 
life, although it is a very sad story, is the most 
beautiful story in the history of France and one of 
the most beautiful stories in the history of the whole 
world. 

Joan of Arc was born in a little village called 
Domremy on the river Meuse in that part of north- 
[70] 


BIRTHPLACE OF JOAN OF ARC AT DOMREMY 
(Now destroyed by the Germans) 







































































































































































JOAN OF ARC 

eastern France where the French and the Ger¬ 
mans fought so many battles during the Great 
War. Fighting went on all round Domremy while 
Joan was quite a little girl. Once a band of sol¬ 
diers came to her village, drove away the cattle and 
stole the furniture out of the poor people’s cottages, 
and at many other times Joan had seen wounded 
men being carried along her village street. Joan 
was just a simple country girl, fond of going to 
church, spending her days spinning and helping her 
mother to do the housework. She had a very kind 
and tender heart and it made her sad to think of 
the sorrows of her country and of the poor men 
who were killed, and of the poor women who had 
lost their husbands and their sons and their homes 
through the wars that never seemed to come to an 
end, because the English would try to conquer 
France, instead of being content to live happily and 
peacefully in their own land. 

When Joan was thirteen, she began to hear 
mysterious voices which spoke to her, or, perhaps, 
I ought to say which she thought spoke to her, 
when she was alone in the garden and in the fields. 
At first the voices only told her to live a good and 
holy life and promised her that God would help 
her if she tried to be good. Afterwards, she was 
told that two saints, St. Catherine and St. Marga- 

[71] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

ret, would come to her and that she was to do ex¬ 
actly what these saints bade her. And in course 
of time she received this mysterious command: 
“Daughter of God, thou must leave thy village and 
go to France.” There was an old prophecy which 
everybody knew in Domremy that France would 
be ruined by a woman and saved by a maiden, and 
when Joan of Arc received the message from the 
saints, she felt that she must have been chosen to 
be the maiden who should save her country. At 
first she was very frightened. “I am a poor girl,” 
she said, “and know not how to ride a horse or how 
to make war.” But she began to spend more and 
more of her time in church and even to make long 
journeys to other churches and to think more and 
more about the saints and what they had told her. 
Presently there came another message: “Take the 
Standard sent down to thee by the King of Heaven, 
take it boldly and God will help thee.” But again 
the timid girl said, “I am a poor girl knowing 
neither how to bestride a horse nor how to make 
war.” 

Time passed and then an angel appeared to 
Joan of Arc and said to her: “Daughter of God, 
thou shalt lead the Dauphin to Rheims that he 
may there receive worthily his anointing.” When 
she heard this message Joan understood what it 
[72] 


JOAN OF ARC 

was that she had to do. Of course, she knew that 
no man could really be King of France unless he 
were crowned and anointed in Rheims. She and 
all her friends believed that, if Charles VII could 
only be properly crowned, he would be able to drive 
the English out of France, and that then the coun¬ 
try would be once again happy and prosperous. 
You will not be surprised that Joan’s father and 
mother were very angry at the idea of her going 
away from her home and trying to do things which 
strong men had failed to do. They said it would 
be far better that she should stay in the village and 
should go on spinning and looking after the sheep. 
Her father, indeed, tried to keep her at home by 
forcing her to marry a young man who, he thought, 
would make her a good husband, but Joan refused 
to marry and no persuasions and no threats could 
hold her back from obeying the orders which she 
believed that she had received from Heaven. 

At last, Joan went away from Domremy to the 
neighbouring town of Vaucouleurs, where there 
lived a great French lord called Baudricourt. She 
was wearing her coarse red country girl’s dress, 
and, although she was very pretty and very strong 
and healthy, there was nothing about her to show 
that she was at all different from the other country 
girls who lived in the villages round about. It 

[73] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

was not easy for Joan to see the great lord, Baudri- 
court, but she was very patient and persistent and 
at last she was allowed to go into the castle. When 
she saw Baudricourt she said to him: “My Lord 
Captain, know that God has again given me to 
wit, and commanded me many times to go to the 
gentle Dauphin, who must be and who is the true 
King of France and that he shall grant me men at 
arms with whom I shall raise the siege of Orleans 
and take him to his anointing at Rheims.” Baudri¬ 
court was interested in the young girl. He made 
inquiries about her and found that she had lived 
a good and saintly life, and, after some hesitation, 
he wrote a letter to the Dauphin Charles, telling 
him that there was a young saint at Domremy who 
wanted to come and help him. The poor dauphin 
badly needed help and was ready to take it from 
anybody or anywhere. I do not suppose he really 
believed that Joan would be able to help him, but, 
nevertheless, he wrote back to Baudricourt, telling 
him to send her along to him. She left her native 
country dressed as a boy and riding on a horse. 
It was in the spring of the year 1428 that Joan at 
last reached Chinon, a town on the river Loire 
where the Dauphin Charles was living. If you 
find Domremy on the map and then find Chinon 
you will see what a long journey Joan had to make, 
[ 74 ] 


JOAN OF ARC 

and I am sure you will easily imagine how many 
dangers she had to pass through on her way. 

The Dauphin Charles was almost a dwarf, very 
thin, very timid and suspicious. His life had been 
very sad. He had been chased by the English 
from one town to the other ever since he was a boy 
of sixteen. He was a very pious man who said his 
prayers regularly and obeyed all the orders of the 
Church. But he was also very superstitious and 
he used always to keep astrologers and magicians 
at his court. Charles received Joan in the evening 
in a large hall lighted by fifty torches. He was 
surrounded by barons in their armor, by lords 
dressed in fur robes, by bishops and many priests. 
You would think that Joan would have been very 
frightened when she found herself before the king 
and all of these great men. They stared at her as 
she walked up the room, a strong well-built girl 
wearing breeches like a man and with her dark hair 
cut round in soup-plate fashion like a page. She 
took no notice of the great soldiers or the bishops 
but went straight up to Charles, took off her cap, 
courtesied and said: “God give you long life, gen¬ 
tle Dauphin.” He asked her name and what she 
wanted and she replied: “My name is Joan the 
Maid, and the King of Heaven speaks to you by 
me and says that you shall be crowned at Rheims 

[ 75 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

and be Lieutenant of the King of Heaven who is 
King of France.” She then asked to be given 
soldiers whom she would lead to Orleans and with 
whom she would drive the English away. The 
king was rather suspicious, but he was always very 
kind to the poor and the modest, and he took Joan 
on one side and had a long conversation with her. 
Then he sent his councillors to talk to her and to 
find out all they could about her. They asked 
her about the voices that she had heard and about 
the saints who had come to her, and they asked 
her, too, why she had cut her hair and dressed her¬ 
self like a man. After an examination that lasted 
for six weeks, the councillors decided that Joan 
should have her way and should be sent to Orleans. 
They said: “To fear her or reject her when there 
is no appearance of evil in her would be to rebel 
against the Holy Ghost and to render oneself un¬ 
worthy of Divine succour.” 

So, at last, Joan started out at the head of a 
small army to rescue Orleans from the English. 
She wore a suit of white armour and rode on a 
beautiful black horse. At her side was a small axe 
and the sword of St. Catherine, and in her hand she 
carried a white banner made of coarse white cloth 
edged with a silk fringe. On this banner was 
painted a picture of Our Lord seated on His throne 
[ 76 ] 


JOAN OF ARC 


and holding a globe in His left hand. This banner 
was painted for Joan by a Scotch painter called 
Hamish Power, who had settled in the town of 
Tours. Joan was at this time just eighteen years 
old. The soldiers who rode with her were rude men, 
hardened by years’ experience of the horrors of 
war, but Joan managed them very cleverly, and 
she was so good and so pure that these wild soldiers 
never swore in her hearing and always treated her 
with veneration and respect. Her appearance out¬ 
side Orleans astonished the English, who, indeed, 
were growing tired of the siege, and they allowed 
her to ride untouched through their lines. 

The people of Orleans received her with enthu¬ 
siasm. They believed that she had been sent by 
Heaven to deliver them from their enemies. Her 
coming filled them with new energy and fresh 
courage and they marched out of the town and 
attacked the forts which the English had built right 
round their walls. Fort after fort was captured 
until, after some rather desperate fighting, the last 
fort fell into the hands of the French, and the 
English army was obliged to march away towards 
the north. In this last fight poor Joan was wounded 
and, though she was so brave and unselfish, she was 
very frightened by her first wound. She wept bit¬ 
terly, too, when she saw the dead bodies, strewn all 

[77] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

over the battlefields. After the victory, she went to 
the great church at Orleans and knelt down at Mass 
with all the people kneeling round her and weeping 
with joy at the great deliverance which had come to 
them through this young girl. 

The Dauphin’s prudent councillors advised him 
to be content with the victory that had been gained, 
and not to attempt any dangerous advances into the 
country held by the English north of the Loire. 
But Joan urged the king to make a bold march to 
Rheims, because, as I have told you before, she 
knew quite well that he never could really be King 
of France until he had been crowned there. Charles 
wisely listened to the Maid, and his army started, 
with Joan riding with her standard at its head. 
Several small battles were fought on the way, but 
the French reached Rheims without much loss, and 
Charles was crowned in the great Cathedral on 
Sunday, July 17, 1429. 

Joan was always anxious that all Frenchmen 
should be good friends and should love each other, 
jand during the march to Rheims she dictated a let¬ 
ter (she could not write herself) to the Duke of 
Burgundy, who was on the side of the English and 
had fought against his own countrymen, urging 
that all Frenchmen should “forgive one another 
heartily as good Christians ought to do.” When 
[ 78 ] 


JOAN OF ARC 

the crown was placed on Charles’s head Joan threw 
herself on her knees before him and said: “O gen¬ 
tle King, now is fulfilled the will of God, Who was 
pleased that I should raise the siege of Orleans and 
should bring you to your city of Rheims to be 
crowned and anointed, showing you to be true king 
and rightful possessor of the realm of France.” 
Joan felt that her work was over. She felt that 
she had done all that she had been commanded by 
Heaven to do. After the coronation she said to the 
Archbishop of Rheims: “I wish it would please 
God that I should go and tend sheep with my sister 
and my brothers. They would be so happy to see 
me. At least I have done what Our Lord com¬ 
manded me to do.” 

The coronation of the Dauphin had almost a 
magical effect in France. Town after town wel¬ 
comed him with cheers and enthusiasm, and it 
looked as if the English would soon be driven out 
of the country altogether. The English, however, 
persuaded the Duke of Burgundy to go on helping 
them, and the duke laid siege to the town of Com- 
piegne which had opened its gates to Charles and 
which you will see on the map is very close to Paris. 
Joan hurried to the help of Compiegne, and in one 
of the fights outside the walls she was taken pris¬ 
oner by a Frenchman who was fighting against his 

[79] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

king. This Frenchman sent her to the Duke of 
Burgundy. 

The English were overjoyed when they heard of 
her capture, and they sent a message demanding 
that Joan should be delivered over to them and 
should be tried as a witch. The English hated 
being beaten by a young woman, and they said— 
and I daresay they believed—that no woman could 
possibly have defeated their fierce brave soldiers 
unless she had been helped by devils. 

It is a very sad thing that Charles VII, who 
owed everything to Joan, did nothing whatever to 
help her when she had fallen into the hands of her 
enemies. The Duke of Burgundy hesitated for a 
little while, but the friendship of the English was 
very valuable to him, and he was persuaded to obey 
their orders and to hand Joan over to the men who 
were thirsting for her blood. Joan was cruelly 
treated during her imprisonment, and the story of 
her trial is a sad thing for an Englishman to read, 
for, though among the men who made wickedly 
untrue charges against her, were Frenchmen in the 
English pay, the responsibility for Joan’s death 
rests with the English Government, although the 
simple English people had nothing whatever to do 
with it. Day after day, Joan was examined and 
cross-examined by clever bishops and priests, but 
[ 80 ] 


JOAN OF ARC 

her answers were always straight and sincere. One 
day she was asked, “Does God hate the English?” 
And she answered: “Of the love or hate God 
may bear the English and what He does with their 
souls I know nothing, but I know that they will be 
put forth out of France with the exception of such 
as shall perish in it.” 

Over and over again she declared: “God has 
always been my Lord. In all that I have done the 
devd has never had any power over me.” I need not 
tell you all that poor Joan was made to suffer or of 
all the insults that were heaped on her. Her trial 
was really a mockery, for, from the beginning, her 
enemies were determined that she should die. De¬ 
serted by her friends, forgotten by the king whom 
she had helped, she was burned alive in the market 
place at Rouen where her statue now stands. Even 
the rough English soldiers were awed into silence 
when this beautiful young girl was so cruelly killed. 
An old writer says that ten thousand men wept as 
they watched her sufferings, and after her death 
one of the English king’s secretaries said: “We are 
lost, we have burned a saint.” 

This is the story of J oan of Arc, a story of cour¬ 
age and purity and splendid faith which all the 
world loves to remember. A little while ago Joan 
was recognized as one of the saints of the Roman 

[ 81 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
Catholic Church at a wonderful ceremony held in 
the great Church of St. Peter’s in Rome, and the 
whole of France nowadays look on her as the pa¬ 
tron saint of its country. When the Englishman 
said: “We are lost, we have killed a saint,” he spoke 
the absolute truth. Joan died in 1431. After her 
death the English lost battle after battle, and were 
obliged to surrender one town after the other until 
by the year 1451 Calais was the only place in 
France which belonged to the English king. Joan 
had been killed, but her spirit led her countrymen 
to victory. 


[82] 


CHAPTER VI 

LOUIS XI AND HIS TIMES 


I F you read Sir Walter Scott’s famous story 
Quentin Durward (perhaps some of you have 
read it already) you will find a splendid de¬ 
scription of Louis XI, the next French king about 
whom I have to tell you. Quentin Durward was a 
young Scotchman who, like many of his country¬ 
men, went to France to be a soldier and to fight in 
the wars which were always taking place in that 
unhappy country. He was travelling alone near 
the town of Peronne in the northern part of France 
—you have probably heard the name of this town 
if any of your friends or relations fought in the 
Great War—when he met Louis XI, and this is 
Sir Walter Scott’s description of the king: 

“His jerkin, hose and cloak, were of a dark uni¬ 
form colour, but worn so threadbare, that the acute 
young Scot conceived that the wearer must be 
either very rich or very poor, probably the former. 
The fashion of the dress was close and short—a 
kind of garments which were not then held deco¬ 
rous among gentry, or even the superior class of 

[83] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
citizens, who generally wore loose gowns which de¬ 
scended below the middle of the leg. 

“The expression of this man’s countenance was 
partly attractive, and partly forbidding. His 
strong features, sunk cheeks and hollow eyes, had, 
nevertheless, an expression of shrewdness and 
humour congenial to the character of the young 
adventurer. But then, those same sunken eyes, 
from under the shroud of thick black eyebrows, 
had something in them that was at once command¬ 
ing and sinister. Perhaps this effect was increased 
by the low fur cap, much depressed on the forehead, 
and adding to the shade from under which those 
eyes peeped out; but it is certain that the young 
stranger had some difficulty to reconcile his looks 
with the meanness of his appearance in other 
respects. His cap, in particular, in which all men 
of any quality displayed either a brooch of gold or 
of silver, was ornamented with a paltry image of 
the Virgin, in lead, such as the poorer sort of pil¬ 
grims bring from Loretto.” 

You will guess, from this description, that Louis 
XI was very different from most of the kings about 
whom you have been told. He did not care at all 
for jewels or fine clothes. He did not value what 
men call “glory,” or think that it was a fine thing 
[84] 


LOUIS XI AND HIS TIMES 

to fight battles for the sake of fighting. He was 
mean to look at, and he was mean in his habits. But 
he was very clever and very patient, and, for all 
his meanness and for all his cruelty, he did a far 
greater work for France than most of the splendid 
kings in her history who strutted about in their fine 
clothes and led their armies to victory. Louis XI 
was the son of Charles VII, and Charles VII was 
the king who was taken by Joan to Rheims and 
crowned in the Cathedral there. Unfortunately, 
Charles VII was not the great man that poor Joan 
thought him. He was always sickly and weak, and, 
as he grew older, his life became more and more 
selfish and stupid, and he was never really able to 
govern France properly or to protect the poor peo¬ 
ple and to see that they were treated justly. And 
I want you to remember that this is the first duty 
of a king. When he was quite a young man, Louis 
XI had a dreadful quarrel with his father, who 
would probably have killed him h^d he not escaped 
and taken refuge with the Duke of Burgundy. The 
Duke of Burgundy was the richest and most pow¬ 
erful of all the great French lords, and we have 
already found out that, when the king was weak, 
the great lords always grew more powerful. 
Indeed, this Duke of Burgundy was quite as pow¬ 
erful as the king himself. Just look at the map 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
again. He owned all the country which we now 
call Burgundy round the town of Dijon, and north 
of Burgundy he owned Lorraine and that part of 
France which lies on the north of the Somme, the 
whole of the country that we now call Belgium, 
and a great deal of Holland. If you look at the 
size of these provinces you will realize what a great 
man the Duke of Burgundy must have been. 
Other great lords, who at that time were rich and 
powerful enough to defy the French king, were the 
Duke of Brittany (look at the map again and you 
will find that Brittany is in the west of France), 
the Duke of Provence in the south, and the Duke of 
Nemours, whose country was in the south-west, 
bordering on the Pyrenees and Spain. All these 
great lords had armies of their own and they never 
obeyed the King of France unless they wanted to. 

When Charles VII died, the Duke of Burgundy 
went with Louis XI to Rheims for the new king’s 
coronation. The duke and his chief nobles wore 
splendid costumes blazing with jewels. Their 
horses had saddles made of velvet and silk embroi¬ 
dered in gold, and they took with them hundreds 
and hundreds of knights and soldiers. Indeed, the 
duke was a far finer figure than the king whom he 
was escorting. 

While Louis was living in exile with the Duke of 

[ 86 ] 


ARRTVAL OF LOUIS XI IN PARIS 



















LOUIS XI AND HIS TIMES 

Burgundy, he had thought a great deal about his 
country and he had determined to do everything 
that he could to make it united and to destroy the 
power of the great lords, who cut the country up 
between them and really made France into half a 
dozen different kingdoms. It was a great task, and 
the king knew that he must behave very cautiously 
and think carefully before he took any action. 
First of all, this king, who never could find enough 
money to buy himself a new hat, collected the large 
sum of four hundred thousand golden crowns, with 
which he bought back from the Duke of Burgundy 
the towns that the duke had taken on the river 
Somme, and once more made them part of the 
kingdom of France. Soon afterwards, the great 
lords became frightened at this quiet, sober king. 
They hated the idea that he might make them obey 
the law and pay their taxes, and they made a league 
among themselves to fight against him and to make 
him as weak as his father had been. When he heard 
about this, the king at once asked them to come to 
the town of Tours to talk things over with him, and 
he talked to them so cleverly that, for a little while, 
they made up their minds that they would behave 
properly and keep the peace. But this peace did 
not last very long. 

Louis’s brother joined his enemies, and soon 

[87] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

there were battles again, and Frenchmen were 
fighting against and killing each other. All the 
villages and small towns near Paris were destroyed 
and the people began to suffer just as terribly as 
they had suffered in the days when Joan of Arc 
came to rescue France from the English. After a 
while the clever king made up his mind that he 
could not defeat the great lords and that the great 
lords could not defeat him. It seemed to him to be 
silly to go on fighting any longer. So he made a 
peace in which he agreed to give money and prov¬ 
inces to the men who had fought against him if they 
would lay down their arms and go back to their 
homes. You will think, when you read this, that by 
agreeing to this treaty Louis was making himself 
weaker than ever and that he was merely helping 
the great lords to be more mischievous. But I have 
told you how crafty he was. He knew that the 
great lords would soon be quarreling among them¬ 
selves, and that, if he only had sufficient patience, 
he would surely get back all the provinces that he 
had been forced to give away. And this is exactly 
what happened. 

He had given Normandy to his brother, but in a 
very, very little while it was back again in the king¬ 
dom of France. But the Duke of Burgundy (the 
old duke had died since Louis was crowned and had 
[ 88 ] 


LOUIS XI AND HIS TIMES 

been succeeded by his warlike son, Charles) was 
still so powerful that the king was obliged to fight 
with the armies that he sent to punish the people of 
Liege who had rebelled against him. However, 
Louis went on waiting and watching. Every now 
and again one of his enemies would fall into his 
hands, and when this happened he promptly put 
him to death, for Louis was as cruel as he was 
crafty, and he never hesitated to kill when he 
thought that killing would serve his purpose. 

While he was fighting the great nobles, Louis did 
his best to encourage the trade of his country. He 
helped the people of Lyons to set up the silk looms 
which have made that city rich and famous. He 
established markets and fairs all over the country. 
He insisted that goods, stolen by the lords from 
hard-working merchants, should be returned. He 
also was very religious, and, all through his reign, 
he constantly gave large sums of money to many 
churches. Most of the time the bishops and priests 
were on his side, but when they offended him he 
punished them just as harshly as though they had 
been quite humble people. It was a cardinal and a 
bishop who had betrayed the king to the Duke of 
Burgundy and compelled him to go with the duke 
to Liege, and when the king had proved their guilt, 
he imprisoned the cardinal and the bishop in two 

[ 89 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

iron cages, just eight feet square, and kept them in 
these cages like two animals in a Zoological Garden. 

In order to carry on his struggle against the great 
lords, Louis was compelled to make the merchants 
in Paris and the other cities of France pay heavy 
taxes, and, of course, the merchants grumbled very 
much about these taxes, as men always do. But as 
his reign went on, the merchants, and even the 
labouring people of France, began to realize what 
a good thing it would be for them if the king suc¬ 
ceeded, and if the power of the great lords were 
broken and France made a united country. So 
whenever he had to fight, and Louis never fought 
if he could help it, he could always count on getting 
good soldiers from Paris and Rouen and Orleans 
and the other French towns. 

All the time that he was struggling with his 
nobles, Louis lived in constant fear that the English 
would once again cross the Channel and invade his 
country. The English king, Edward IV, was the 
brother-in-law of the Duke of Burgundy, and, 
therefore, always likely to take his side. The English 
still held Calais, and at any moment they might 
land an army there. You will realize what a terri¬ 
ble thing for the people all these wars and fears of 
war were when I tell you that once, when Louis 
expected an English attack, he sent his soldiers and 
[ 90 ] 


LOUIS XI AND HIS TIMES 
burned down all the villages and farmhouses for 
miles round Calais, in order that there should be no 
food for the English if they came. It was a curious 
thing to do, was it not? To destroy the country in 
order to save it from its enemies! 

Edward IV actually arrived in France with a 
small army in July, 1475, but there was no fighting 
after all, for Louis gave the English king a large 
sum of money, and after a few weeks he sailed 
home again with his soldiers. Charles, Duke of 
Burgundy, died two years afterwards, and on his 
death nearly all the places that he had owned in 
France passed to the king. The greatest and most 
dangerous of the nobles was dead, and through his 
death France became more united than it had ever 
been before. 

Louis now felt that his own end was fast ap¬ 
proaching. He was very ill. But he was most 
anxious for the future of his son, and he struggled 
harder than ever to secure permanent peace for his 
country. He died in 1483 at the age of sixty-one, 
after having reigned for twenty-three years. He 
never succeeded in making France quite a united 
country. His work had to be carried on long, long 
afterwards by two great French ministers called 
Richelieu and Mazarin, about whom I shall have 
much to tell you. 


[ 91 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

Great things were happening in the world during 
the reign of Louis XI, and perhaps the greatest of 
them all was the invention of the Printing Press. 
Before printing was invented, books had to be 
written out by hand, and there were very few books 
in the world and very few people could read the 
few that there were. King Louis realized what a 
good thing printing was, and he encouraged men 
to set up printing presses in various French towns. 
He bought books for the royal libraries and he 
helped learned men as well as artists and musicians. 
He loved beautiful churches, and many of the finest 
churches in France owe their existence to his gen¬ 
erosity. I have told you how he encouraged the 
silk weavers of Lyons. He also encouraged 
woollen manufactures. He was the first French 
king to start a navy, and he built many harbours 
round the coast. So you will see that this king, 
who wore shabby clothes, and could at times be very 
cruel and avaricious, served his country splendidly 
and helped very much to make France and the 
French people great and prosperous. In one thing 
only was he like most of the princes of olden times. 
Louis was very fond of hunting, and it was the only 
amusement over which he was extravagant. He 
would send to Flanders and Spain for harriers, to 
Naples for horses, and to Sicily for mules, and he 
[92] 


LOUIS XI AND HIS TIMES 

would pay large sums of money for them, when he 
could not be persuaded to spend any money at all 
on fine clothes and jewels. 

There is one thing more that I want you to 
remember about the reign of Louis XI. During 
his time two great writers lived in France whose 
books I hope you will read one of these days. One 
of them was called Philippe de Comines. He 
was one of the king’s secretaries and he wrote a 
history of the king’s wars and his successes. The 
other was called Francois Villon. Francis Villon 
was a thief, and he led a very wretched and un- 
happy life. But he was a very splendid poet, and 
his poetry is still read with pleasure by French¬ 
men and Frenchwomen who have forgotten all 
about Louis XI, although Louis was a mighty 
king and poor Francis was only a miserable 
scamp. 


[ 93 ] 


CHAPTER VII 


THE YALOIS KINGS 

I OUIS XI died in 1461. Henry IV, the next 
great King of France, was crowned in 1589. 
The years between the death of Louis and the 
accession of Henry are among the most important 
years in the history of Europe. You will remem¬ 
ber that I told you that printing presses were first 
made while Louis XI reigned. The printing press 
was the beginning of what is called the Renaissance, 
which means the re-birth of Europe. Men began 
to be interested in books and in pictures as well as 
in fighting. At the beginning of the sixteenth cen¬ 
tury, many of the greatest painters who have ever 
lived in the world were busy in Italy painting 
beautiful pictures which you can see for yourself 
if you ever go to Rome and Florence and other 
Italian cities. In the sixteenth century, too, 
Shakespeare lived in England and wrote his plays, 
Cervantes lived in Spain and wrote a wonderful 
book called Don Quixote, which I hope you will 
read very soon, and Rabelais, a hearty wholesome 
laugher at the follies of the world, lived and wrote 
[94] 


THE NIGHT OF THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW 


















I 'iffl 













r? 







THE VALOIS KINGS 

in France. But it was not only with pictures and 
books that men were busy at this time of the Re¬ 
naissance. Just before the beginning of the six¬ 
teenth century, Columbus sailed across the Atlantic 
in a tiny little ship and discovered the great conti¬ 
nent of America. Columbus was an Italian, but the 
King of Spain gave him the money to buy his ships 
and pay his sailors. A few years after Christopher 
Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a Portuguese called 
Magellan not only reached America, but sailed 
round South America into the Pacific Ocean. 
Magellan was killed by savages on the Philippine 
Islands, but some of his men continued the voyage, 
and they were the first people who ever sailed round 
the earth. 

One other important event happened about the 
beginning of the sixteenth century. In the year 
1517, a German monk called Luther revolted 
against the authority of the Roman Catholic 
Church. This German monk, Luther, was soon 
followed by a Frenchman called Calvin, and these 
two men, Luther and Calvin, were the leaders of 
what is called the Reformation and the founders of 
the Protestant Churches. By the middle of the 
sixteenth century, therefore, instead of the whole 
of Europe belonging to the Roman Catholic 
Church and obeying the Pope, part of Europe 

[95] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

remained Catholic and obeyed the Pope, and part 
had become Protestant and regarded the Pope as 
an enemy. This difference of religion led to many 
wars and bitter quarrels both between one nation 
and another, and also between different parts of the 
same nation. 

After what I have told you, you will see how very 
important and how very interesting this chapter of 
our story must be. Men had learned to print books. 
They had discovered new countries. Great artists 
and great writers were busy all over the world, and 
a difference of religion stirred men’s passions and 
added to the difficulty of keeping the peace and 
assuring justice and happiness for the poor people. 

Now, for a moment, we must go back to Louis 
XI. He was so successful in destroying the power 
of the great French lords and securing the unity of 
France that, at his death, his country was the most 
powerful and the most prosperous country in Eu¬ 
rope. Other nations, and particularly England, 
envied the prosperity of France and grew fright¬ 
ened of her power. The English King Henry VII 
thought that France might make war against him, 
and, in order that he might have an ally, he married 
his son to Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of 
the King of Spain. The French kings who fol¬ 
lowed Louis XI were not content to stay at home 


THE VALOIS KINGS 

and look after the happiness of their own subjects: 
they wanted to conquer other nations, and they 
marched across the Alps and invaded Italy. At 
first they were successful, but, after a while, the 
Italians, with the help of the Spanish and the 
English, compelled the French to go back again to 
their own country. Men had hoped now that there 
were plenty of books to read and so many new 
interests in life that kings would leave off fighting 
for the sake of fighting, and it was a shock to find 
that the two young kings like Francis I of France, 
who, because he liked books so much, was called 
“the father of letters/’ and Henry VIII of Eng¬ 
land, who was also a very learned man, were just as 
fond of fighting as the ignorant kings who had lived 
before them. Francis I wanted to be not only King 
of France but King of all Europe. He fought 
against the Germans and the Spaniards and the 
Italians only to be badly beaten and taken prisoner 
at the Battle of Pavia. When he had lost this bat¬ 
tle, he sent a message to his wife in which he said: 
‘‘All is lost but honour.” The very next year he 
broke a treaty which he made with his conquerors, 
and then he lost his honour as well as everything 
else. 

The patience and the cleverness of Louis XI had 
made France into a great nation. Circumstances 

[97] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


soon made Spain the dangerous rival of France, 
and this rivalry went on for many years. Perhaps 
you will remember that in one of the early chapters 
of this book I told you that the Moors, a people 
something like the Arabs, who followed the religion 
of Mahomet, crossed into Spain from Africa, and, 
after overrunning the country, crossed the Pyre¬ 
nees and invaded France. They were soon driven 
out of France, but it was not until the time when 
Louis XI was ruling France—that is to say, seven 
hundred years afterwards—that they were finally 
driven out of Spain. Very soon afterwards, Co¬ 
lumbus crossed the Atlantic and the King of Spain 
claimed that all America belonged to him. He 
became the richest king in Europe and his country 
grew more and more powerful and wealthy. King 
Philip of Spain, more than any other king, was 
faithful to the Roman Catholic Church, and more 
than any other king he hated the Protestants who 
had rebelled against the authority of the Pope. I 
expect you have already read about this King of 
Spain in an English history. He married Queen 
Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII, and he per¬ 
suaded her to persecute the Protestants in Eng¬ 
land. When Mary died and the great Queen Eliz¬ 
abeth reigned in England, Philip sent the Great 
Armada to conquer the country, and I am sure you 
[98] 


THE VALOIS KINGS 
know the story of how Francis Drake and other 
English sailors, many of them themselves Roman 
Catholics, destroyed the Spanish ships and saved 
England from the Spanish king. 

While Philip was reigning in Spain, France was 
governed by a king called Henry II. I have told 
you that one of the leaders of the Protestant Refor¬ 
mation was a Frenchman called Calvin, and though 
Calvin lived for most of his life in Geneva in Swit¬ 
zerland he had many followers in France among 
the merchants and the great lords, although the 
common people for the most part remained faithful 
to the Roman Catholic Church. The French king 
was also a Roman Catholic, but he had no particu¬ 
lar hatred of the Protestants. Henry II, indeed, 
made an alliance with the Protestant princes of 
Germany and fought a long war against Spain. 
The wars of the kings who followed Louis were 
generally unsuccessful, and Henry II was badly 
defeated by the Spaniards in a battle fought at St. 
Quentin in the north of France—you may remem¬ 
ber a great battle was also fought there in the Great 
War—and was forced by the King of Spain to sign v 
a treaty in which he agreed to persecute the French 
Protestants and to try and compel all the French 
people to belong to the Roman Catholic Church. 
By agreeing to this, Henry II was promising to 

[99] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


restart civil wars in France, and this treaty was 
hated by the peaceful French Roman Catholics just 
as much as by the French Protestants. 

Henry II was married to one of the most wicked 
women who ever lived. As you grow older you will 
find that very few people are really very wicked, 
just as, unfortunately, very few people are really 
very good, and that most men and women are 
partly wicked and partly good. But Catherine de 
Medici, the wife of Henry II, was altogether 
wicked. She was an Italian woman, very clever 
and well-educated, fond of books and beautiful 
pictures, but there was absolutely nothing that she 
would not do to gain her own ends. She poisoned 
her enemies and was guilty of a hundred abomi¬ 
nable crimes. When her husband died, her eldest 
son, Francis II, became King of France. He was 
very young, very foolish and nearly always ill. He 
was married to a daughter of the King of Scotland, 
a beautiful young girl who afterwards became 
Mary Queen of Scots, and about whom, I am sure, 
you have read. Francis II was far too foolish to 
be able to govern the country himself, and his 
mother, Catherine de Medici, thought that her son 
would let her govern for him. But in this she was 
disappointed. Queen Mary, though she had a 
Scotch father, had a French mother. This French 
[ 100 ] 


THE VALOIS KINGS 

mother belonged to a powerful family called the 
Guises, and when Mary married Francis and he 
became king, the Duke of Guise and his five broth¬ 
ers were the real kings of France. The Duke of 
Guise was a great soldier, and, during the lifetime 
of Henry II, he drove the English out of Calais. x 
Perhaps you have been told how angry Queen 
Mary of England was when she had learned that 
Calais was lost and how she said that when she 
died the word “Calais” would be found written on 
her heart. Calais was the last town that the 
English owned in France, and since the Duke of 
Guise took that town, England has had no other 
French possessions. 

The Guises compelled Francis II to carry on the 
persecutions of the Protestants to which his father 
had agreed. It was not really because they loved the 
Catholic Church and hated Protestantism that the 
Guises wanted the Protestants to be persecuted. 
It was really because they feared the power of the 
great Protestant lords, and because they thought 
these Protestant lords might persuade the king to 
take their great positions away from them. The 
persecuted Protestants joined together in a conspi¬ 
racy against the Guises and against the King, and 
the result was that hundreds of the Protestant lords 
were captured and brutally killed, that hatred was 

[ 101 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

sown right through the land of France, and that 
Frenchmen began to suspect each other and fight 
against each other when they ought to have been 
standing together and helping each other, 
f These religious w r ars went on in France for years 
and years. I want you to understand, from the 
beginning, that they were not caused because men 
loved their religion and believed that the other 
religion was wrong, but because rich and powerful 
lords wanted to destroy other lords who might have 
taken their wealth and their power away from 
them. Over and over again, during these wars, the 
Catholics, who just wanted to look after their own 
affairs and to worship God in their own way, tried 
to stop the persecutions and the fighting. But 
unfortunately, at this time, the common people had 
no power whatever to interfere in the quarrels of 
the great lords, although these quarrels brought 
them so much loss and so much suffering. 

Francis II died when he was quite a young man, 
and he was succeeded by his brother, Charles IX, 
then a boy of eleven. The death of Francis II did 
one good thing for France, since for a time it de¬ 
prived the Duke of Guise and his brothers of their 
great influence. While Charles IX was a boy, his 
mother, Catherine de Medici, ruled the country. 
Catherine was not quite certain at first whether the 
[ 102 ] 


THE VALOIS KINGS 
Catholics or the Protestants were most powerful. 
At the beginning she favoured the Protestants and 
she pretended that she herself was more than half 
inclined to agree with them. The Duke of Guise 
had surrendered his authority much against his will, 
and, after a little while, he practically seized the 
new boy-king and his mother, in order, as the peo¬ 
ple believed, to prevent them stopping the persecu¬ 
tion of the Protestants. This action of the Duke of 
Guise made men on both sides furiously angry. In 
some places, the Catholics began to kill the Protes¬ 
tants and in other places the Protestants began to 
kill the Catholics, and beautiful Catholic churches 
were destroyed by them in Orleans, Rouen, Lyons, 
and other French towns. So furious and so foolish 
were the Protestants that they even threw down 
the statue of poor Joan of Arc in Orleans and 
smashed it to pieces. After these things, of course 
it was natural that a regular war should start be¬ 
tween the two parties. It is only right to say that 
Catherine de Medici, wicked woman though she 
was, tried her hardest to stop the war, but neither 
side would listen to her. The German Protestant 
princes sent soldiers to fight on the side of the 
French Protestants, and Queen Elizabeth also sent 
them three thousand soldiers from England, 
although she made the Protestants give her the 

[103] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
town of Havre in return. Queen Elizabeth, let me 
tell you, was never a woman to give something for 
nothing. 

In the battles that took place between them, the 
Catholics generally won until the Duke of Guise 
was assassinated by a Protestant soldier. This 
assassination made Catherine the most powerful 
person in France and, since she was now convinced 
that the Catholics were stronger than the Protes¬ 
tants, she at once became a very pious Catholic and 
was as ready to persecute the Protestants as the 
Guises had ever been. It is not necessary for me 
to tell you all the details of the quarrels and the 
fighting that went on. Catherine at last made up 
her mind that, in order to preserve the power of the 
king, who had now, under her orders, definitely 
sided with the Catholics, all the Protestant princes 
must be put to death. She invited them to come to 
Paris on the occasion of the marriage of the Protes¬ 
tant Henry of Navarre with her daughter, Mar¬ 
guerite, and, on the evening of St. Bartholomew’s 
Day, in the year 1572, over four thousand Protes¬ 
tants were killed in cold blood in the streets and the 
houses of the French capital. This was, of course, 
a horribly wicked action, for which Catherine and 
the Guises bear the responsibility. It was with the 
[104] 


THE VALOIS KINGS 

greatest difficulty that they were able to persuade 
the young king to consent to the massacre. 

It was always wicked to do wrong that good may 
come of it. But when we read the story of long 
ago ages, it is not enough for us to say that this 
thing was very dreadful and this other thing w r as 
very wicked, but we ought to ask ourselves why 
such things were done. France was being de¬ 
stroyed by the quarrels of Roman Catholics and 
Protestants, and Catherine saw that unless these 
quarrels were stopped, France, which Louis XI 
had made so rich and prosperous, would become 
miserable and weak again. She thought the best 
way to stop the quarrels was to kill all the Prot¬ 
estant princes, and that was why she arranged 
the wicked massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. 
Catherine’s policy might have been successful but 
for the fact that by far the cleverest of the Prot¬ 
estant leaders, Henry of Navarre, had not been 
killed. I shall tell you all about Henry of Navarre 
in our next chapter. Here it is enough for me 
to say that, although he was the son of a good and 
pious Protestant queen, he really did not care 
himself much about religion, though he was anx¬ 
ious for the well-being of France as well as am¬ 
bitious for himself. 

Charles IX died in 1574, and a third son of 

[105] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
Catherine de Medici became King of France, with 
the title of Henry III. He was almost as weak 
and wicked as his brothers, and during his reign 
poor France was harried and terrified by constant 
fightings and killings. The Duke of Guise and 
his family made up their mind that they ought 
to be the actual Kings of France, and they formed 
a League utterly to destroy all the Protestants and 
then to drive Henry III off the throne. So there 
were three parties in the country each hating the 
other two and each ready to fight against each 
other—the Protestants, the Royalists, who were 
the friends of the king, and the followers of the 
League, who were the friends of the Duke of Guise. 
The Protestants were the weakest of the three, but 
Henry of Navarre, their leader, was very watch¬ 
ful, and, by supporting King Henry III at the 
right time, he managed to save the Protestant cause 
from destructon. 

Finally, towards the end of his life, Henry III 
took the Duke of Guise and his brothers prisoners 
and murdered them in his palace. This wicked 
act, however, did not do him any good, for, a 
few months afterwards, he, too, was murdered by 
a monk who wanted to punish him for killing the 
Duke of Guise. Catherine de Medici died just 
before her son was killed. On her deathbed, she 
[ 106 ] 


THE VALOIS KINGS 

sent for him and said: “Peace is an absolute ne¬ 
cessity for France, but that the kingdom may en¬ 
joy that blessing it is essential that he shall grant 
his people liberty of conscience.” These were very 
wise words, and it was a pity that Catherine had 
not spoken them years before. It was too late 
for her son to take her advice, but you will see 
that it was followed by the next king of France, 
Henry of Navarre, who was called Henry IV. 

Henry III was the last of the Valois. Perhaps 
France suffered more from the folly of the Valois 
kings than from their wickedness, and this folly 
of theirs was constantly used by other countries, 
particularly by Queen Elizabeth of England, to 
weaken France and to prevent the French people 
becoming as great and as prosperous as they might 
have been had their kings been wiser. You will 
find much that is exciting to read about the Valois 
kings in some of the novels written by the great 
French writer, Alexandre Dumas, and particularly 
in one of them called Chicot the Jester . 


[107] 


CHAPTER VIII 


HENRY THE FOURTH 


T HERE is no doubt that the League, about 
which I told you in the last chapter, which 
supported the Duke of Guise against both 
the King of France and the Protestants, could 
count on the sympathy of the majority of the 
French people who remained faithful to the Catho¬ 
lic Church and obeyed the priests and the bishops. 
Still, despite this sympathy, the Duke of Guise did 
not feel strong enough to fight against his enemies 
without some outside help. So he sent to Philip, 
the King of Spain, and the King of Spain at once 
gave him Spanish soldiers to fight on his side. 
When Henry III, the last of the Valois kings, 
was, as I told you at the end of the last chapter, 
killed by a monk, there was a large number of 
these Spanish soldiers inside the walls of Paris. 
I particularly want you to remember this, and I 
want you to remember, too, that, during all the 
years of their troubles, the French people were 
never allowed to settle their quarrels, themselves, 
or to decide, themselves, who should be their king 
[ 108 ] 


HENRY THE FOURTH 

and what sort of government they should have. 
All the time there were Spanish soldiers and Ger¬ 
man soldiers and English soldiers fighting on one 
side or the other, and, of course, making things 
worse and adding to the troubles of the people. 

When Henry III died, by the law of France, 
Henry of Navarre became king. But Henry of 
Navarre was a Protestant, and most of the people 
of France were Catholics. So the Duke of Guise 
and his friends said that Henry could not be king. 
The trouble was to decide who should be king in his 
place. The King of Spain, who had married a 
sister of Henry III, said that his son ought to be 
King of France, but the French people, and even 
the Guises and the leaders of the League, hated the 
idea of a Spaniard being King of France. The 
leaders of the League began to quarrel with each 
other, and this, of course, greatly strengthened the 
position of Henry of Navarre. All the Protestants 
were naturally on his side, and many of the Catho¬ 
lics were on his side, too, because he was a brave 
and wise man and they thought that, if he were 
king, he would bring peace to the country, destroy 
the power of the great lords once and for all, and 
allow all men, whether they were Catholics or 
whether they were Protestants, to worship God in 
their own way. 


[109] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

Henry of Navarre was a very different man 
from the sons of Catherine de Medici, three of 
whom had been Kings of France. As I have told 
you, they were weak, sickly men with minds as 
weak as their bodies. But Henry had been brought 
up by a wise mother, far away from Paris in the 
mountains of Navarre. He had often stopped 
for weeks with mountaineers, eating their simple 
food and learning active habits. And even though, 
afterwards, he had lived for a long time in Paris, 
he remained strong and healthy and active. It 
took a tremendous lot of work to make Henry of 
Navarre tired. He never spent more than a 
quarter of an hour over any of his meals, and it is 
said that he never wanted more than three hours 
sleep at one time. Even his enemies said that 
Henry of Navarre could win a battle while an¬ 
other man was putting on his boots. The people 
of France had grown very tired of sickly, lazy 
kings, and they were greatly attracted by this 
strong, healthy man, who was just thirty-six years 
old when Henry III died, and he became the legal 
King of France. 

After the death of Henry III, Henry of Navarre 
thought it wise to go away from Paris to the town 
of Dieppe, where he expected some English soldiers 
would land, whom Queen Elizabeth had sent to 

[ 110 ] 


ENTRY OF HENRY IV INTO PARIS, 1594 













































































































% 



























. 
























HENRY THE FOURTH 

help him. Near Dieppe, he fought his first battle 
against the League and won his first victory. It 
was not a very important battle, and it was a long 
time before Henry really succeeded in conquering 
all his enemies. But, during four years of almost 
ceaseless fighting, Henry never missed an oppor¬ 
tunity of proving to the people of France that he 
would be just and fair to everybody if they only 
accepted him as their king. When there was any 
fighting to be done, he was always in the front rank, 
taking the same risks as the common soldiers. 
When the battle was over, he was always merciful 
to his enemies. Once when he was besieging Paris, 
the people of the city, who really had nothing to 
do with the quarrels of the League and Henry, suf¬ 
fered terribly because no food could come inside 
the walls. Henry’s generals told him that if he 
would attack the city he could easily take it because 
the people had grown so weak, but he would not 
listen to them. He said: “I am the father and 
the king of the people; I cannot hear the story of 
their suffering without being touched to the bot¬ 
tom of my soul; I cannot prevent those who sup¬ 
port the League from perishing, but I must open 
my arms to all who ask my clemency.” 

In addition to his other qualities, Henry of 
Navarre possessed a great sense of humour. His 

[in] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

treasurer, who was a very wicked and dishonest 
man, spent most of the king’s money on himself 
and often left the king himself almost without food. 
After having been for two days with very scanty 
meals, one day at dinner-time Henry went to the 
quarters of his treasurer (where, of course, he was 
not expected), and sat down to the well-spread 
table. Out of respect to the king’s rank, the trea¬ 
surer and his friends were obliged to rise from their 
places and to stand, hungrily watching the king 
while he ate a splendid meal. 

As time went on, more and more of the French 
people learned to know Henry as a good soldier 
and a wise and merciful king, and more and more 
of them grew weary of the wars and the League 
and the Spaniards, and wished that Henry could 
conquer his enemies and become the King of united 
France. Even men who had been fighting for 
years on the side of the League began to think 
that they had made a mistake and that it would 
be much better to have peace, and for France 
to have one king. One thing only stood in the 
way. Even people who really liked Henry and 
admired his courage and his wisdom felt that no 
man ought to be King of France unless he were 
a Catholic, and that a Protestant king could never 
make the country united and happy. I feel sure 


HENRY THE FOURTH 

if you think about this a little while, you will agree 
that the men who said this were right. In Eng¬ 
land, where most of the people are Protestants, 
there is a law that the king must be a Protestant too. 
In France at the end of the sixteenth century most 
of the nation and practically all the common people 
were Catholics, and, if it is right for there to be a 
law in England that the king must be a Protestant, 
it was also right for the French people to wish very 
much to have a king who belonged to their religion. 
They said to Henry IV: “We want to have you 
as our king but we feel sure that there will be noth¬ 
ing but trouble and fighting unless you join the 
Catholic Church, to which most of us belong.” 
And in the year 1593 Henry of Navarre changed 
his religion. A number of people—many of them 
English—have said since that this was wrong and 
a cowardly thing for Henry to have done, and 
that he simply changed his religion to win a crown. 
We can none of us think very much of people who 
give up the religion of their fathers for money or 
position, but there can be no doubt that Henry did 
a fine thing for the French people when he was 
reconciled to the Catholic Church. He was the 
only man, living at that time, who had the power to 
make France united and prosperous, and he could 
never have carried out this great task unless he had 

[113] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

become a Catholic. Henry was never what is 
called a religious man, and he never cared much 
for forms and ceremonies. I am sure after think¬ 
ing a good deal about him that he acted as he did 
mainly from a sense of duty and from the desire to 
serve his country. We cannot forget that his Prot¬ 
estant friends as well as his Catholic friends per¬ 
suaded him to make peace with the Pope and the 
Church. These Protestants always hotly declared 
that his conversion was perfectly honest. The 
greatest of them, the Duke of Sully, one of Henry’s 
best friends who knew how honest his master was, 
once said that “a Prince who had never cheated 
men was very far removed from the design of cheat¬ 
ing God.” 

After Henry’s conversion, he was crowned King 
of France and the forces of the League, even though 
they were supported by the King of Spain, soon 
began to crumble away before him. In the year 
1594 he marched into Paris, all the church-bells 
ringing, and all the people crowding around him 
and acclaiming him. To them, poor souls, he was 
more than a king, he was a bringer of peace. In 
this hour of triumph, Henry retained his manliness 
and sense of justice. He arranged that the Span¬ 
ish soldiers in Paris should march out of the city 
unharmed, and he himself stood at a window as 
[114] 


HENRY THE FOURTH 

they passed. The soldiers carried their arms low¬ 
ered and their banners furled, and as they passed 
the king the officers saluted and thanked him for 
his kindness. The king saluted them back and 
said, “Good-by, gentlemen, good-bye! Give my 
kind regards to your master. Go your way in peace 
but be sure and don’t come back again.” 

The king pardoned all his French enemies, and 
now that he was safely established in the French 
capital, he set himself to the task of making the 
whole French nation friends and brothers. It was 
a very hard task, and the king was not always 
successful. Some of the Catholics were still sus¬ 
picious of him, and some of the Protestants said 
that he had forgotten all about his old friends and 
did nothing to help them. 

The Spaniards were furious, and they constantly 
made war on him. In those days the Spanish king 
owned the countries which we now call Belgium 
and Holland, and he used constantly to send his 
soldiers across the frontier into northern France. 
Once they captured the town of Calais, which had 
been so recently recovered from the English. 
Sometimes they were joined by one or other of the 
great French lords who were angry with Henry 
and jealous of the justice of his government. But 
Henry never lost patience and never grew tired 

[115] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

of his great purpose of making a united nation. 
Calais was soon won back. The great lords were 
either punished or reconciled. 

In the year 1598 he published the famous Edict 
of Nantes which gave the French Protestants the 
same right to worship God in their own way as the 
French Catholics possessed. For some time Henry 
had a difficult task in persuading the Catholics to 
accept this law, and the Protestants, who were 
given so much, demanded more. But, finally, the 
king had his way in this as in most other things. 
“There must be no more distinction,” he said, “be¬ 
tween Catholics and Protestants. All must be 
good Frenchmen, and let the Catholics convert the 
Protestants by the example of a good life. I am 
a Shepherd King, who will not shed the blood of 
his sheep, but seek to bring them together with 
kindness.” The publication of the Edict of Nantes 
brought to an end the civil war which had lasted 
for nearly forty years, and which had brought 
nothing but suffering and loss to the French people. 

About the same time, Henry made peace with 
Spain, and for the rest of his life he spent his time 
in restoring and developing the prosperity of his 
country. He reduced the number of his soldiers 
and he ordered the Governors of the provinces to 
abolish their armed guards altogether. He for- 
[ 116 ] 


HENRY THE FOURTH 

bade any person who was not a soldier to carry 
firearms. He reduced the taxes and he forgave 
everybody past taxes which they owed to the Gov¬ 
ernment, but which they were too poor to pay. 
With the help of his great minister, the Duke of 
Sully, he tried to make the people pay taxes in a 
fair proportion to the money that they possessed, 
and he did his very best to stop wastefulness and 
extravagance. He forbade the rich people to 
wear gold and silver on their garments or to use 
these precious metals in the decorations of their 
houses. He sent his soldiers along the high roads, 
and destroyed the bands of highwaymen and rob¬ 
bers who had for so many years lived on the labour 
of the country-people. Like Louis XI, he en¬ 
couraged the silk weavers in Lyons. He found 
the money to send French ships across the Atlantic 
to the continent of America, and it was through 
him that a French colony was established in Can¬ 
ada, a colony which rivalled the English colonies 
in North America until the war between the Eng¬ 
lish and the French almost two hundred years later. 
So far-sighted was Henry IY that he felt that the 
prosperity of his own country could not continue 
unless the whole world remained at peace, and un¬ 
less the whole world was as prosperous as France, 
and he drew up a plan called the Establishment of 

[117] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


the League of Nations, very much like the League 
of Nations which has been established since the 
Great War. I am sure you will think it was a very 
wonderful thing that this should have been done 
] over three hundred years ago. How many wars 
would have been prevented, and how many men’s 
lives would have been saved, if Henry IV had been 
able to persuade Europe to join in his plan! 

Henry IV was married twice, first to Margaret 
of Valois, the daughter of Catherine de Medici, 
and afterwards to an Italian princess called Marie 
de Medici, who was, however, no relation of Cath¬ 
erine. Unfortunately for him, he was not very 
happy with either of his wives. Although he did 
so much for France and for the French, Henry 
was always surrounded by enemies, and over and 
over again attempts were made to kill him. In 
the year 1610 , while he was driving through Paris, 
a man called Francis Ravaillac stabbed him and 
the king died at the age of fifty-seven. His name 
is still revered by the French people because he 
* brought peace and unity to the country; and I 
hope I have told you enough about him to make 
you understand why a famous French writer has 
said that Henry IV was the greatest of all the 
Kings of France. 


[ 118 ] 


CHAPTER IX 


RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN 

I F you have read my story so far, you must 
have noticed that the French people—the people 
who lived and worked in France, who ploughed 
and sowed the fields, who spent their days weav¬ 
ing silk or making wines, or who minded the shops 
in the big cities—had nothing whatever to do with 
settling the government of their country. Great 
lords quarrelled with each other or quarrelled with 
the king. Wars were fought. Hundreds of men 
were killed. Cities and villages were destroyed, 
and the people simply had to do what they were 
told to do and to endure with patience the suffer¬ 
ings which all these quarrels brought to them. No¬ 
body bothered about what they thought or what 
they hoped. Nobody ever thought of asking them 
whom they would like to be king over them, or 
what sort of government they preferred. So far 
in all my story only three times did the common 
people really interfere in the history of their coun¬ 
try. The first time was when Peter the Hermit 
preached his great Crusade, and the workmen in 

[ 119 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

the towns and the peasants in the country left 
their homes and marched with Peter right across 
Europe to try and rescue Jerusalem from the 
hands of the enemies of Our Lord and of the Chris¬ 
tian Church. The second time was when Joan of 
Arc, a simple country girl, went to the help of the 
King of France, defeated the English and began 
the great movement which finally drove the English 
soldiers out of France. The third time was when 
the common people of France made it quite clear 
that, though they wanted peace and unity very 
much indeed, they would not have a king who was 
a Protestant to rule over them. 

It is, of course, quite possible for a country 
to be very happy and prosperous if it is ruled by 
a wise king who can do everything that he likes, 
but who never wants to do anything that will hurt 
his people. Unfortunately, there have not been 
very many such wise, good kings. Henry IV was 
a wise and a good king. When he died, his son 
Louis XIII was a little boy, and the country was 
ruled by Henry IV’s widow, an Italian woman 
who never learned to speak French properly, and 
who was extremely stupid and extremely selfish. 
She was a very fat w^oman, with a low forehead 
shaded by frizzly fair hair. She was very short¬ 
sighted, and she always ate too much and was gen- 
[ 120 ] 


RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN 

erally self-indulgent. She was spiteful, and she 
used to work herself up into terrible fits of temper. 
She cared nothing whatever about the happiness of 
the French people, and she surrounded herself with 
Italian flatterers who naturally cared no more for 
France than the queen did and who gave their mis¬ 
tress the most foolish advice. While Henry IV 
lived, he forced the great lords to behave themselves 
and to live in peace, but, the very day after he died, 
the great lords, under the leadership of the Prince 
of Conde, began once more to plot with each other 
to take away from the power of the sovereign and 
to make themselves little kings. The queen gave 
great fortunes to her Italian favourites. The great 
lords rose against them and put them to death, and 
generally the country began to again get into the 
same bad state that it was in before Henry IV mas¬ 
tered the great lords. It was a fortunate thing for 
France that, when Louis XIII was twenty-one 
years old, he found a great statesman called Cardi¬ 
nal Richelieu to help him rule the country. The 
king himself was not very wise. While he was still 
a boy even his mother said that he was half-witted. 
He used to spend most of his time in the kitchen, 
and his favourite amusement was to help the cook 
prepare the dinner. As he grew up, men found 
that he was brave and that he was anxious to do 

[ 121 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
his duty, but he was always rather stupid and very 
passionate and suspicious. The king never really 
liked Richelieu, but the cardinal was so clever and 
so tactful that he made the king do exactly what 
he wished him to do, and from the year 1622 until 
the time of his death it was Cardinal Richelieu who 
was really King of France. 

Years and years ago it was quite a common thing 
for a cardinal (although cardinals are generally 
priests) to be the chief ministers of the different 
European countries. Cardinal Richelieu was the 
chief minister of Louis XIII of France just as 
Cardinal Wolsey was the chief minister of Henry 
VIII of England. When you have finished this 
chapter I want you to read a wonderful and excit¬ 
ing romance called The Three Musketeers , written 
by the great French writer, Alexandre Dumas. 
From this romance you will learn far better than I 
can tell you what happened at the French Court 
at this time, and while you are being excited by the 
adventures of D’Artagnan and his friends, you will 
also learn a great deal about Richelieu and Louis 
XIII and his wife, the beautiful Anne of Austria, 
and the English Duke of Buckingham, the friend 
of Charles I, a man who made mischief wherever he 
went, both in England or in France. 

Richelieu’s one idea was to continue the work of 

[ 122 ] 


RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN 

Henry IV, and to make France one united coun¬ 
try, in which all men should obey the orders of one 
king. The French Protestants, you will remem¬ 
ber, were a minority of the French people, but they 
were always very ready to fight for what they 
thought were their rights, and they cared more for 
their religion than for their country. Richelieu 
determined to destroy the power of these Protes¬ 
tants. He besieged their city, La Rochelle, and, 
as you can read in The Three Musketeers, finally 
captured it largely owing to the failure of the Eng¬ 
lish to come to the Protestants’ assistance. 

All through his life, Richelieu constantly had to 
defeat plots made against him by the great lords 
and by the king’s wife Anne of Austria, who hated 
him very bitterly. Richelieu was a man whom it 
was difficult to defeat. Though the king was some¬ 
times jealous of him, he always supported him; 
and Richelieu himself, though like Cardinal Wolsey 
he loved to live in great pomp, surrounded by many 
servants and with guards of his own at his doors, 
always wanted to make his country great and pros¬ 
perous. He was very wise, and he was able rightly 
to estimate the value of all the people with whom 
he had to do. He was very patient, and nothing 
would make him alter his mind when it was once 
made up. Under his rule, French armies defeated 

[123] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


the Spaniards and the Germans and France be¬ 
came the most powerful country in Europe. The 
most wonderful thing about Richelieu was that, 
while he was working so hard, he was always dread¬ 
fully ill. He had a terrible internal disease and 
his head was always aching, and this great fierce 
cardinal, whom everybody feared and whom even 
the king dared not contradict, was suffering griev¬ 
ous pain all the time. During the last days of his 
life, he was carried through France on a great litter. 
When he and his attendants arrived at a town for 
the night they had to knock the whole of a wall out 
of one side of a house in order to get the litter under 
a roof. Richelieu died in 1642, one year before the 
death of the king. Although he made France a 
great nation, he cared just as little for the common 
French people as the worst kings who had ruled in 
the country. He never tried to ensure that justice 
should be done to everybody. He always dragged 
from the poorest people the last penny in taxes 
that they could afford to pay. His one idea was to 
make the king great and to fill his safe with money 
so that he could live in luxury and make war against 
his enemies. Richelieu worked all his life to add 
to the glory of the French king. He cared noth¬ 
ing for the happiness of the French people. The 
cardinal, however, did care about books and learn- 
[124] 


RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN 


ing, and he established the famous French Acad¬ 
emy, which still exists, to which most of the great 
French writers, who have lived during the past 
three hundred years, have belonged, and which has 
done so much to encourage French learning and 
French literature. It is interesting to know that 
it was during the time of Cardinal Richelieu that 
the first French newspaper was printed and sold 
to the people. 

Richelieu died and Louis XIII died. France 
again had a boy for a king, and once again a Queen- 
Mother, this time Anne of Austria, ruled the coun¬ 
try. Unlike Marie de Medici, Anne of Austria 
spoke French exactly like a Frenchwoman. She 
had beautiful eyes and hair, and was generally a 
kind, good-tempered lady, though she was not very 
wise and loved to be admired and flattered. Anne 
of Austria soon gave over the task of ruling France 
to an Italian called Cardinal Mazarin, who had 
been one of Richelieu’s secretaries, and who, so far 
as he was able, tried to carry out the policy of his 
master. But Mazarin was not quite as clever as 
Richelieu, and he was hated by the French, and par¬ 
ticularly by the French lords, because he was an 
Italian and a foreigner. They formed a league 
against Mazarin something like the league which 
had existed in the time of the Valois kings and 

[ 125 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


about which I have already told you. Not only the 
great lords, but the merchants and the people of 
Paris joined this league, which was called the 
Fronde, and they all did their best to drive Mazarin 
out of the country. Mazarin was sly and patient 
and tactful. He knew, perhaps as well as any man 
who ever lived, how to find the soft answer that 
turneth away wrath. Once he went out of France 
altogether, pretending that he was afraid of his 
enemies and letting them think that they had con¬ 
quered him; but he very soon came back again, se¬ 
cure in the favour of the queen and more powerful 
than ever. The Parliament of Paris was among 
the enemies of Cardinal Mazarin. This Parliament 
of Paris was a very different thing from the Eng¬ 
lish Parliament. The English Parliament makes 
laws which the people of England must obey. In 
the days about which I am writing, the King of 
France made the laws, and all the Parliament had 
to do was to write down in a book the laws which 
the king had made—that is to say, to record what 
the king had decided. Sometimes the Parliament 
refused to write the new laws in their books, and 
this is what they did during the time when Mazarin 
was chief minister and Louis XIV was a boy. 
Mazarin first tried bullying the Parliament, and, 
when he found that this was no good, he gave 
[ 126 ] 


RICHELIEU AT LA ROCHELLE 


2 





2 

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RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN 

money secretly to most of its members and bought 
them over to his side. After that, he had no more 
trouble and the Parliament did as he ordered it. 
It was lucky for Mazarin that Marshal Turenne, 
the greatest French soldier of the time, was on his 
side and won his battles for him, though Mazarin 
never fought when he could avoid fighting. He 
was like Louis XI in this. But when Mazarin did 
have to fight, Turenne won the battles. 

You will remember that the struggle between 
the kings and the great lords had gone on through 
several reigns. You will remember that it was 
Louis XI who first determined that France should 
have one strong king and not a number of little 
kings. You will remember that, when Louis XI 
died and the weak Valois kings sat on the throne 
of France, the Guises and other great lords con¬ 
stantly rebelled against the king and that their 
power almost equalled his. You will remember 
that, when the Valois kings were followed by Henry 
IV, the great lords were once more forced to be¬ 
have themselves and Henry IV made himself mas¬ 
ter of the whole of France. You will remember 
that when Henry IV died, the great lords once 
more tried to rule the king and how they tried again 
when the great Cardinal Richelieu was no longer 
there to keep them in order. Mazarin finished the 

[127] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

work which Louis XI had begun and which Henry 
IV and Richelieu had carried on. When he died, 
and the young King Louis XIV began to rule 
France, the power of the great lords was broken 
for ever. From that time they were nothing but 
the obedient servants of the king, and the king was 
the one supreme master of the country. 

During the years of Mazarin’s rule in France, 
the English people rose against Charles I and 
cut off his head. The country was afterwards 
governed by Oliver Cromwell, who began life as 
a brewer in the town of Huntingdon, and became 
one of the greatest and most powerful men in 
Europe. The King of France and all the other 
kings in Europe were very angry when the Eng¬ 
lish people killed Charles I, because they felt that 
their own peoples might, perhaps, follow such a bad 
example. But Mazarin, realized that Cromwell 
was a great man, and that England ruled by Crom¬ 
well was a far more powerful nation than it was 
when it was ruled by Charles I. He felt that it 
would be a good thing for France to make friends 
with these powerful English, and he made an al¬ 
liance with Cromwell, who sent English troops to 
France to fight with the French against the Span¬ 
iards, just as, nearly three hundred years after¬ 
wards, English soldiers were sent across the Chan- 
[ 128 ] 


RICHELIEU AND MAZARIN 
nel to fight with the French against the Germans. 
Mazarin, with the help of these English soldiers, 
captured the town of Dunkirk, which you will see 
on your map is now the most northerly seaport in 
France. Before Mazarin’s time, Dunkirk had be¬ 
longed to the Spaniards, but ever since it has been 
part of France. It is a pleasure for me to be able 
to tell you that the English, who had done so much 
harm in France in earlier days, helped at this time 
to give the French a town in which Frenchmen 
lived, and which always ought to have been theirs. 

Mazarin arranged a marriage between Louis 
XIV and a Spanish princess, and then he died. 
After he had conquered his enemies he lived in 
magnificent splendour in a palace in Paris, which 
is now the National Library. He filled his palace 
with beautiful pictures and many books, and wher¬ 
ever he went he was surrounded with magnificently 
dressed guards. His fortune was far larger than 
that of Cardinal Richelieu. But though Mazarin 
was fond of money, and though he cared nothing 
about the happiness of the poor, he did real service 
to France in destroying the last power of the great 
lords, and in saving the country from the terrible 
civil wars which had gone on in France, from time 
to time, for hundreds of years. 


[ 129 ] 


CHAPTER X 

EE GRAND MONARQUE 

1 0UIS XIV is always called “le grand mon- 
Jarque,” which means “the great king.” While 
Mazarin lived, he had been content to spend 
his life in hunting and in other forms of amuse¬ 
ments. Directly the cardinal died, the king took 
over the government of the country, and for fifty- 
four years he worked perhaps harder than any man 
in France. Louis XIV had been very badly edu¬ 
cated. He had read very few books, and he could 
speak no foreign language, except Italian, which 
he had learned from his grandmother. He was 
tall and strong and good-looking, with dark eyes 
and curly chestnut hair. He was always very 
dignified and very reserved. He was a splendid 
horseman and a good dancer, and, all through his 
long life, he had magnificent health. Louis XIV 
had a most tremendous appetite. One of his cour¬ 
tiers has told us: “I have often seen the king eat 
four full plates of soup of various kinds, a whole 
pheasant, a partridge, a great plate of salad, two 
large slices of ham, mutton, dressed with gravy and 
[130] 


LE GRAND MONARQUE 

garlic, a dish of pastry, and, after all that, fruit 
and hard-boiled eggs.” You will not be surprised 
that such huge meals sometimes made the king feel 
very ill, but he was so strong that he soon got over 
his illness. He could stand any amount of fatigue, 
and he never seemed to be tired. Louis XIV was 
always very courteous. He never passed a woman, 
even if she were a servant maid, without raising his 
hat. He was very intelligent, and he was a man 
who always thought twice before he spoke once. 
Although he sometimes did cruel things, he was 
generally kind and indulgent. But, above all other 
things, Louis XIV was immensely vain. He 
believed that it was the will of God that he should 
be King of France, and he believed that the King 
of France was the greatest man on earth. He did 
not think that it was his duty to be the servant of 
his people and to see that they were happy and 
prosperous. He thought that France belonged to 
him just as your gardens belong to your fathers, 
and that he had the right to do exactly what he 
liked with the country and with the people who 
lived in it. Louis once said, “I am the State.” By 
this he meant, “I am the nation; I am the one man 
who really matters in France.” 

Louis XIV did not like living in Paris, and he 
built himself a great palace at Versailles, which is 

[131] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

a few miles from the French capital. It was in this 
palace, you may remember, that the Peace Treaty 
between France, England, America, and the other 
Allies and Germany was signed in the summer of 
1919. The great lords who, in earlier times, had 
been little kings, living in their own little kingdoms 
and governing and oppressing the people, had 
nothing to do now that their power was destroyed 
and they were forced to obey the king. So they 
gathered round the king and spent their days flat¬ 
tering him and waiting on him almost as if they 
were servants. It was this flattery and the fact 
that, from morning to night, he was surrounded by 
lords and ladies, gorgeously dressed and wearing 
wonderful jewels, that made Louis XIV think that 
he was really far more than an ordinary man and 
that he alone had any right to have his wishes 
considered. 

The French king was never alone. When he 
woke up in the morning, great lords stood by his 
bedside. They helped him to dress, and rules were 
made as to who should hand him his shirt, who 
should give him his breeches, who should do up his 
shoes, and so on. All his meals were taken with the 
great lords standing round his chair, all of them 
eager to hold the dishes and to pour out the wine. 
All day long, splendid carriages rolled along the 
[132] 


LE GRAND MONARQUE 

road from Paris to Versailles, and the palace was 
always full of gentlemen as splendidly dressed as 
their ladies. The whole life of Louis XIV was one 
long ceremony. Everything was settled before¬ 
hand, and I think you will agree that the life of this 
great King must have been very dull. Such a very 
clever, intelligent man, too, must surely have grown 
tired of the constant flattery of the silly lords who 
surrounded him. Once when the king had to have 
a small operation, these lords went in crowds to the 
king’s doctor and begged him to perform the same 
operation on them. It is hard to believe that men 
should have been so silly. Although the king and 
his courtiers lived in all this splendour, in many 
ways their habits would seem to us very unpleasant. 
For instance, they always ate with their fingers, 
and Louis XIV would not allow any one at his 
table to use a fork. Once when Charles II of 
England was having supper with Louis and his 
queen, the two kings were wearing their hats, as 
was the custom in those days. Every time the 
French queen spoke to the English king, he politely 
lifted his hat to her, and, as they were all eating 
with their fingers, we are told that, by the end of 
the meal, poor Charles’s hat was most terribly 
greasy. 

I am sure you will understand that all this 

[133] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
splendour in the king’s palace must have cost a 
tremendous lot of money. This money had to be 
found by the French people, by the merchants and 
the workmen in the towns, and by the farmers and 
the labourers in the country. When the king broke 
the power of the great lords he said that, as a sort 
of compensation, they should not be asked to pay 
any taxes. The bishops, too, and the monasteries, 
although they were often very rich, were also let off 
their taxes. This meant that the poorer people had 
to pay more than they would have done had every¬ 
body paid his share. The consequence was that 
while Louis XIV was called the Great, and while 
all the world was impressed by the splendour in 
which he lived, the poor people were often very 
miserable and very unhappy. The money that he 
needed was collected for Louis XIV by a clever 
man called Colbert, who had been a clerk in the 
service of Cardinal Mazarin. Colbert did many 
useful things for France. He loved Paris very 
much, and it was through him that many beautiful 
buildings were erected in the city. Colbert collected 
the money and the king spent it, and it was a very 
funny thing that, while the French people admired 
and almost loved Louis XIV, they hated Colbert 
very bitterly. When he died, his house was sur¬ 
rounded by a crowd of people who threatened 
[134] 


LOUIS XIV AND MOLIERE 










































































































































































LE GRAND MONARQUE 
to tear his body to pieces, and he had to be buried 
in the middle of the night with regiments of soldiers 
guarding his coffin and keeping the angry people 
back. 

Louis XIV was not content merely to be the 
master of France, he wanted to be the master of ^ 
the whole of Europe. When he came to the throne, 
Spain, which had been for a very long time the most 
powerful European nation, had begun to grow 
weak. In those days, the Emperor of Germany 
lived in Vienna, and he had no time to think of any¬ 
thing but defending himself from the Turks who 
were threatening to take his country from him. 
The rest of Germany was ruled by a number of 
weak, idle princes, whose one idea was to take off 
their hats to the French king. In England, Crom¬ 
well had died and Charles II had been restored to 
the throne. Charles was a witty, good-natured 
man, who was always in need of money and did not 
mind in the least how he got it. He used to take 
money from Louis XIV, and, of course, he had to 
obey the French king’s orders. So it happened 
that England, which, for generations, had op¬ 
pressed France and which, in Cromwell’s time, had 
helped her to win Dunkirk, became under Charles 
II almost the slave of France. Louis XIV loved 
soldiers. He had a splendid army, and, when a 

[135] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


king who can do exactly what he likes has a great 
army, it is natural that he should make wars just 
for the fun of fighting, without caring a bit about 
the people who are killed. At the beginning of the 
reign of Louis XIV, thanks to the energy of Col¬ 
bert, France had begun to build a great navy, for 
which dockyards were built in the seaports of Brest, 
Toulon and Rochefort. So you will see that Louis 
was quite ready to fight, and all that he wanted was 
somebody to fight against. The “somebody” was 
soon found. 

For many years the country, which we now call 
Holland, belonged to Spain, and I daresay you 
may have read how the Spanish rulers persecuted 
the people of Holland—who are called Dutch— 
because they were Protestants and because they 
loved liberty and hated being governed by foreign 
kings. At the beginning of the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury, owing to the weakness of Spain, the Dutch 
were able to drive away their Spanish rulers and to 
make themselves an independent nation called the 
Republic of the United Provinces. This Republic 
soon grew rich and prosperous. In the ports of 
Amsterdam and Rotterdam there were large num¬ 
bers of merchant ships which made long voyages to 
places as far away as China and Brazil, carrying 
away Dutch manufactures and bringing back all 
[136] 


LE GRAND MONARQUE 

manner of goods from these foreign ports. War¬ 
ships were built to protect these merchant ships, 
and the Republic of the United Provinces was for 
a few years the most important naval power in 
Europe. While Holland was thus growing pros¬ 
perous, she did not forget the things that are far 
more important than money. There were splendid 
universities in the country and many schools, and 
the Dutch printing presses were busy printing 
books for the people to read, while great writers 
from other countries settled in Holland, because 
they were allowed there to write exactly what they 
wanted to write. At the same time, great artists 
were busy painting pictures which we still look at 
with pleasure and admiration. One of these artists 
was called Frans Hals, and perhaps you have at 
home a print of his famous picture, “The Laughing 
Cavalier.” Another of them was called Rembrandt, 
some of whose pictures are now in America. 

The rich Dutch merchants, living comfortably in 
their houses in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, were 
not in the least impressed when they were told of 
the splendour of Louis XIV and of his great palace 
at Versailles. Indeed it made them laugh when 
they were told that a duke handed the king his 
shirt when he got up in the morning, and that an¬ 
other duke gave him his breeches, and that a prince 

[137] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


did up his shoes. They thought that this was all 
very silly, and they made jokes about the great 
French king in their newspapers, and they refused 
to obey the orders which he sent them. All this 
made Louis XIV very angry, and he determined 
to crush these independent, insolent Republicans 
and force them to recognize that he was the great 
king who must be obeyed. Louis XIV was never 
in a hurry. For four years he prepared for a war 
against the Dutch. He persuaded Charles II to 
sign a treaty at Dover, in which the English king 
pledged the help of England against Holland. He 
bought the help of the Swedes, and in 1672 Louis 
XIV, with his great general, Marshal Turenne, 
and an army of 120,000 men, crossed the Rhine and 
marched towards the city of Amsterdam. The 
Prince of Orange, who afterwards became King 
William III of England, was at the head of the 
Dutch army, which, however, was very much 
weaker than the French army and was unable to 
oppose the French advance. 

The country of Holland is very peculiar. It is 
low-lying and marshy, and a great part of it is 
below the level of the sea, which is kept out of the 
country by a whole series of dykes and locks. In 
order to prevent the French army from overrun¬ 
ning their country, the Dutch broke down the 
[138] 


LE GRAND MONARQUE 
dykes, which had taken them years and years to 
build, and allowed the sea to flood their beautiful 
gardens and their cornfields, and to carry away 
their oxen and their sheep. It was a wonderful 
thing for them to have done. It meant an immense 
loss to the people, but the water saved Amsterdam 
from the French king. It is not necessary for me to 
tell you all the details of a war that went on for 
years. Sometimes one side won battles and some¬ 
times the other. Many towns and cities were de¬ 
stroyed, as always happens in wars, and great 
suffering was inflicted on the poor. At last, in the 
year 1678, the English people would not allow 
Charles II to send any more English soldiers to 
fight against the Dutch, who were struggling for 
their liberty against the French king. Indeed, they 
made Charles II give his niece, the Princess Mary, 
in marriage to William of Orange. After this, 
Louis XIV felt that he had better bring the fight¬ 
ing to an end. For six years he had been the terror 
of Europe. France had gained certain towns and 
provinces as a result of the war, but the French 
king had not been able to crush brave little Holland. 

Soon after the fighting had finished, Louis XIV 
revoked the Edict of Nantes, which, you may 
remember, was drawn up by his grandfather, 
Henry IV, to give the French Protestants the same 

[139] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

rights and liberties as the French Catholics. The 
revocation of this Edict was followed by the perse¬ 
cution of the Protestants, a persecution which had 
no sort of excuse, which was very cruel and which 
hurt the whole of France very much. Soldiers used 
to be sent into the towns where the Protestants 
lived. They were quartered in the people’s houses 
and were ordered to beat their hosts, to rob them, 
and to destroy their property. The king’s idea was 
that if he treated the Protestants in this way, they 
would turn Catholics. But persecutions are always 
a failure. Catholic kings have often tried by cruelty 
to force their Protestant subjects to change their 
religion, and Protestant kings have tried exactly 
the same thing with their Catholic subjects, and 
both Catholic and Protestant kings have failed, and 
their subjects have refused to change their religion 
however cruelly they were persecuted. In the time 
of Louis XIV, thousands of French Protestants 
escaped from France and went to live in other 
countries where they were allowed to worship God 
in their own way. As they were often very clever 
and industrious, they brought prosperity to the 
countries in which they settled. Some of them went 
to England. The silk-weaving industry in Spital- 
fields, in London, was established by French 
Protestants who had escaped from the cruelty of 
[140] 


LE GRAND MONARQUE 

Louis XIV. The Protestant kings were very 
angry with Louis for revoking the Edict of Nantes, 
and war soon started again between France on the 
one side and almost all the countries of Europe on 
the other. 

About this time, the English people drove James 
II from the English throne, and made the Dutch¬ 
man, William of Orange, the bitter enemy of Louis 
XIV, King of England. Louis XIV was a friend 
of James II, and he welcomed him to France and 
gave him money and soldiers with which to win 
back the English throne. But James II utterly 
failed and, after more fighting, Louis XIV was 
finally forced to recognize William III as King of 
England. Again there was a short period of peace 
—and then more fighting. 

William III died and was succeeded by Queen 
Anne, and the English army was now commanded 
by the great Duke of Marlborough. He fought 
the French in many battles and won great victories 
at Blenheim, at Ramillies, where he compelled the 
French to withdraw from the country which we now 
call Belgium, and at Oudenarde. These battles 
were fought towards the end of Louis XIV’s long 
life, and they robbed him of a great deal of the 
glory which he prized so much. The war came to 
an end at last with a treaty which gave Gibraltar, 

[141] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
Newfoundland and large parts of North America 
to the English, and which took away from France 
many of the possessions which had been won in 
Louis XIV’s earlier wars. So you will see, that all 
the fighting and all the suffering brought hardly 
anything in the end to the man who had begun the 
quarrel. Louis XIV died in 1715 at the age of 
seventy-seven. Towards the end of his life he mar¬ 
ried a very serious, pious woman who was not a 
princess, but just the widow of a poor French poet. 
Under her influence Louis made his courtiers put 
away all their gorgeous clothes and fine jewels and 
wear very sober clothes made of dark-coloured 
cloth. The king, too, insisted that everybody should 
keep fast days and should go to church very often, 
and there were no more balls and parties in the pal¬ 
ace of Versailles. Right up to the end of his long 
life the king worked very hard. He lived in these 
last days not only without luxury, but almost with¬ 
out what we should think ordinary comfort. It is 
said that his own rooms at Versailles were so cold 

\ 

that, in the winter, both the wine and the water 
froze in the glasses on the dinner table. Louis XIV 
lived so long that his sons and all his grandsons but 
one died before him. This one grandson he had 
made King of Spain, and he was the ancestor of 
Alfonso, the present King of Spain. Louis was 
[142] 


LE GRAND MONARQUE 

succeeded on the throne of France by his great- 
grandson, who was a little boy of five years old 
when the old king died. 

During the reign of Louis XIV, much was done 
to encourage and develop French trade. The 
famous factories for the manufacture of Gobelins 
tapestry, of which you may have heard, were started 
by the king, and cloth mills, lace workshops, look¬ 
ing-glass factories and many other industrial con¬ 
cerns were begun. The king built canals, dredged 
rivers so that boats could go up them more easily, 
and built fine harbours. Despite the glory of Louis 
XIV, most of the common people during his reign 
were very poor and very unhappy. The peasants 
in the country had to pay one-half their earnings 
from the fields as taxes to the king. The workmen 
in the cities worked for fourteen hours a day, and 
then were hardly able to earn enough money to buy 
sufficient food for themselves and their families. 
Men often talk of the reign of Louis XIV as the 
golden age for France, but it was certainly not the 
golden age for the poor French people. 

Louis XIV loved music and pictures and plays 
and books. He encouraged great artists. He 
established an academy for the teaching of music, 
and he encouraged the many famous writers who 
lived during his reign. The best known of these 

[143] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

writers were Moliere, whose plays are regarded by 
the French with the same love as Englishmen and 
Americans have for Shakespeare’s plays, the great 
poets Corneille and Racine, and La Fontaine, 
i whose fables I daresay some of you have read. 


[ 144 ] 


CHAPTER XI 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

O UR story, which began some years before the 
birth of Jesus Christ, has now reached the 
eighteenth century after His death. This 
is a most important century in the story of Europe. 
For France it begins with the death of Louis XIV 
in 1715 and finishes with the great French Revolu 
tion, certainly the most important event in the his¬ 
tory of France and one of the most important 
events in the history of the human race. In this 
chapter, I want, if I can, to make you understand 
why the French Revolution took place and why it 
was such a splendid thing for the French, and for 
all the people in the world. The government of 
France during the reign of Louis XV was exactly 
the same as it had been during the reign of his great¬ 
grandfather. The difference was that while Louis 
XIV was a clever man, Louis XV was stupid and 
lazy, caring only for pleasure, thinking all the time 
how to please the idle, wicked women whom he 
made his favourites. Men were chosen for high 
position in the country not because they were clever 

[145] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

or honest, but because they were the friends of these 
favourites, or more often because they had paid 
money to buy the positions. The result was that 
France was very badly governed, and the people 
grew more and more unhappy and more and more 
wretched. A French statesman said in the middle 
of the reign of Louis XV that more Frenchmen had 
died of want within two years than were killed in 
all the wars of Louis XIV. 

The extravagance of the Court of Versailles was 
even worse in the time of Louis XV than it had 
been before. The great lords, the bishops, and the 
women of fashion thought of nothing but pleasure 
and luxury, and cared nothing whatever for the 
mass of the people who were working and suffering 
and almost starving all over the country. The 
king’s word remained the only law of the land. 
There was no such thing as fair trials for people 
before judges and juries. When the king was 
angry with a man, or when one of his friends was 
angry with a man, a paper called a lettre de cachet 
was drawn up and signed by the king, and soldiers 
were sent with this to arrest the unfortunate fellow, 
who was taken off at once to the Bastille, the great 
prison in Paris, or to some other prison, and kept 
there until it pleased the king to let him out. It 
often happened that the king forgot all about him, 
[146] 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

and then he stopped in prison until he died. Louis 
XV was very fond of making wars, although he 
himself took care not to fight. He had some good 
generals, but during his reign France lost far more 
battles than she won. 

In the years during which people had gone from 
Europe across the Atlantic and had settled in 
North America, Frenchmen had made the voyage 
as well as Englishmen and Dutchmen and Span¬ 
iards, and French colonies had been established in 
Canada, round the cities of Montreal and Quebec, 
and much farther south on the shores of the Gulf of 
Mexico round about the city of New Orleans. It 
was a Frenchman who first sailed along the Missis¬ 
sippi river and French explorers were the first to 
travel into the middle of what is now the United 
States. Perhaps you have heard people say that 
the French are not good colonists, which means that 
they are not very successful in making homes away 
from their own homes as the English have done in 
America, in Australia, in New Zealand, and in 
South Africa. This is partly true, and I am going 
to tell you more about it in another chapter, but it 
is also true that the French have been more success¬ 
ful in making friends with the natives in the coun¬ 
tries in which they have settled than any other of 
the European peoples. The Englishman and the 

[147] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


American always look down on people whose skin 
is a different colour from theirs. They think of them 
as inferiors and as servants. The Frenchman has 
always been ready to treat them as equals and to 
make friends with them. When the English and 
the French and the Dutch first went to North 
America, the country was of course inhabited by 
the tribes of Red Indians. And these Red Indians 
were always more friendly with the French than 
with the English, and when the French and the 
English began to quarrel and to fight, there were 
always more Red Indians on the French side than 
on the English side. The French colonies in North 
America suffered very much from the indifference 
of the French king. Louis XV was too busy enjoy¬ 
ing himself at Versailles to bother about the brave 
Frenchmen who had settled in Quebec and Mon¬ 
treal, and who wanted to make a new France across 
the Atlantic in America; and when the war with the 
English began the French had little support from 
France. They were led by a very brave soldier 
called Montcalm. The French, under his leader¬ 
ship, fought a great battle against the English, who 
were led by General Wolfe, on the Heights of 
Abraham, just outside the city of Quebec, in the 
year 1759. Both Montcalm and Wolfe were killed 
in this battle, but the English defeated the French, 
[148] 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

and the result was that, four years later, the whole 
of Canada belonged to England. In the year 1803, 
the country round New Orleans was sold by France 
to the United States, and since then the French have 
had no possessions on the American continent. But 
the French farmers and workmen who left their 
homes and settled in Montreal and Quebec and the 
villages round about stayed there after the country 
had become English. They went on speaking 
French. They had their own churches and schools, 
and they lived their lives in their own way, and 
their descendants have gone on speaking French 
and living their lives in their own way right up to 
now, although they have been British subjects for 
over a hundred and fifty years. During the Great 
War, many of these French Canadians came to 
France as soldiers and fought against the Germans 
for the country that was the country of their fore¬ 
fathers. 

The loss of Canada was only one of the misfor¬ 
tunes that happened during the reign of Louis XV. 
Ever since the Portuguese sailor, Vasco da Gama, 
sailed round the Cape of Good Hope and reached 
Calcutta, in India, in the year 1498, the European 
peoples had been eager to establish trade with India 
and to make settlements in that country. The Por¬ 
tuguese were followed by the Dutch, and the Dutch 

[149] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
by the Swedes, the Danes, the French, and the 
English. In the time of Louis XV, the English 
had settlements at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta; 
and the French had settlements very close to Bom¬ 
bay and very close to Calcutta. Quarrels took place 
between the two peoples, who neither of them cared 
anything about the Indians or their happiness, 
although both sides persuaded Indian soldiers to 
fight for them. The English leader was called 
Robert Clive, and the French were led by a clever 
soldier called Dupleix. Many battles were fought, 
but by the year 1761 the English were complete 
masters of India, and the French were left with 
nothing but a few small settlements. The loss of 
the Indian Empire, like the loss of Canada, was 
caused not by lack of enterprise on the part of the 
French merchants, or lack of courage on the part 
of the French soldiers and sailors, but entirely by 
the indifference of the French king and the stu¬ 
pidity of the French Government. 

There were constant wars in Europe during the 
reign of Louis XV, and these wars, in which the 
French took part, were largely the result of the 
ambition of Frederick the Great, the King of 
Prussia. Until the beginning of the eighteenth 
century, Prussia was a small and unimportant 
country of which nobody took much notice, but 
[150] 


RECEPTION OF THE GRAND CONDE BY LOUIS XIV AT VERSAILLES, 1674 











































































































































THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Frederick the Great began to make Prussia one of 
the most important countries in Europe. He began 
the work which many years afterwards made Prus¬ 
sia the master of the whole of Germany and filled 
her with ambition to be the master of the whole of 
Europe. This ambition was one of the causes of 
the Great War in which so many Americans and 
Englishmen and Frenchmen and Germans lost 
their lives. So you will see that Frederick the 
Great, although he was a German, is a most impor¬ 
tant person in the story of France. It is rather 
interesting to know that, although Frederick some¬ 
times fought against the French, it was by agree¬ 
ments and alliances with the French king that he 
was able to build up the great power which in after 
years was to threaten the very existence of France. 

Now try and think what France was like in the 
middle of the eighteenth century. Her armies had 
been defeated in Canada and in India, and other 
nations were no longer afraid of France as they had 
been in the time of Louis XIV. At home, the 
common people were robbed of half their earnings 
by the king’s tax collectors, and were half fed 
and miserable. The king, who could do exactly 
as he liked, cared for nothing but idle pleasure. 
The nobles paid no taxes and had nothing whatever 
to do except to enjoy themselves and to copy the 

[151] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


vices of the king. The bishops and many of the 
priests were almost as idle and as wicked as the 
nobles and the princes. The French have always 
been a very intelligent people, and it was not to be 
supposed that they were content with the unhappy 
conditions under which they had to live. During 
the reign of Louis XV, one great man after the 
other became discontented with the state of his 
country, and wrote a book to show how things 
might be made better. I want you to remember the 
names of some of these men. There was first of all 
a man called Montesquieu, and he said that the idea 
that a king had been given by God “the right 
Divine to govern wrong” was all nonsense, and that 
all men, however humble they might be, had the 
right to be treated justly. After Montesquieu, 
there came a group of great men who were called 
philosophers, and who together wrote a very long 
book called an Encyclopedia. The greatest of 
these men were Voltaire and Diderot, and it has 
been said that their glory lay “in their hatred of 
things unjust, in their denunciation of the trade 
in slaves, of the inequalities of taxation, of the 
corruption of justice, of the wastefulness of wars, 
in their dreams of social progress, in their sympathy 
with the rising empire of industry which was begin¬ 
ning to transform the world.” The Encyclopedia 
[152] 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

was a very hard book to read, and only few people 
read it and paid attention to what its authors had 
to say. But there was another French writer at 
this time whose books were far easier to read and 
whose teaching had a tremendous effect on the 
minds of the French people. His name was Jean 
Jacques Rousseau, and he said that men were born 
to be good and to be happy, and that they were 
made wicked and unhappy by the folly of kings and 
lawyers and bad priests. He said that men ought 
not to be ruled against their will by a king who very 
likely was himself wicked and silly, but that they 
ought themselves to decide how they should be 
ruled. These were very extraordinary things to 
say in such a time as the reign of Louis XV, and 
you can imagine how the people who read Rous¬ 
seau’s books and believed what he said began to 
hate the king, the waste of money in idle luxury, 
and the heavy taxes that the poor people had to pay. 
Indeed, everybody in France who thought about 
things at all felt certain that something extremely 
thrilling and wonderful was going to happen. The 
philosopher Voltaire wrote in 1764: “The young 
are fortunate, they will see fine things.” Louis XV 
died in 1774. I have told you enough about him to 
show you how harmful his influence had been. I 
have told how, during his reign, men were growing 

[153] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

tired of kings who were able to do what they liked. 
I have told you the names of some of the great men 
who lived in his reign. There were others whose 
names are also worth remembering. There was 
Beaumarchais, who was first a watchmaker, and 
afterwards wrote The Barber of Seville and The 
Marriage of Figaro, plays which no doubt you will 
see one of these days. There was Buffon, the great 
naturalist, whose stories about animals I used to 
read when I was quite a little boy. There was a 
great chemist called Lavoisier, and there were many 
other men who were doing great things and helping 
towards the re-awakening of France that was to 
come a few years later. 

Louis XV was succeeded by his grandson, the 
unhappy Louis XVI. He was not wicked and 
idle like his grandfather, but he was very dull and 
stupid and preferred to spend his time mending 
watches, which he knew he could do very well, 
rather than trying to govern his country, which he 
knew he would do very badly. Louis XVI was 
married to Marie Antoinette, an Austrian princess 
and the sister of the then Emperor of Germany. 
Marie Antoinette was pretty and quick-witted and 
full of life. But she was very proud and very fond 
of pleasure, and she knew nothing about govern¬ 
ment or about the troubles of France. She encour- 
[154] 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
aged all sorts of extravagance, and she wanted to 
bring France back again to the “glorious” days of 
Louis XIV. She did not understand that the 
French people were paying more taxes than they 
could afford to pay. She may not have known how 
poor and miserable they were, but if she did know, 
she did not care, and, instead of encouraging her 
husband to be economical and to try and make 
things better for his country, she urged him to go 
on spending money in luxury and pleasure just as 
his grandfather had done. I shall tell you in the 
next chapter of the unhappy end of Marie Antoi¬ 
nette’s life, but I want you to understand from the 
beginning that it was largely her own fault that so 
many dreadful things happened to her. 

Louis XVI became king in the year 1774, and in 
the year 1778 a very important thing happened for 
France. The English people, who had settled in 
North America, had grown tired of the bad govern¬ 
ment of King George III, and had finally decided 
that they would no longer obey the orders of the 
king who lived far away from them in London, but 
that they would have a government of their own in 
America. George III sent soldiers across the 
Atlantic Ocean—many of these soldiers were Ger¬ 
mans and not English—to compel the English in 
America to go on obeying him, and a war was 

[155] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

fought, the English in America being led in their 
fight against King George’s soldiers by the great 
George Washington. The French in the eighteenth 
century disliked the English and wanted to help 
England’s enemies. A great many Frenchmen had 
read Rousseau’s books, and learned from him what 
a good thing it was for men to be free and to make 
laws for themselves. So a large number of French¬ 
men, under the command of a soldier called 
Lafayette, went to America and helped George 
Washington to defeat King George’s soldiers and 
to establish the independent United States of 
America. When these French soldiers came home 
from your country, where even then men were free 
and made their own laws, to their own country of 
France where the king made the laws and settled 
the taxes, and when they saw again how miserable 
and unhappy the French people were and how 
badly the country was governed, they naturally 
felt that something must be done at once to make 
France as happy and as free and as prosperous as 
the United States of America. Now let me tell you 
again the causes that brought about the great 
French Revolution. First, the poverty and wretch¬ 
edness of all the poor people in the country; 
secondly, the teachings of the philosophers, who 
said that kings had no Divine right to govern, but 
[156] 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

that men ought to govern themselves, make their 
own laws and choose their own rulers; and, thirdly, 
the voyage to America of French soldiers to fight 
with George Washington, who, when they came 
home, wanted their own country to be as free as 
they had helped to make America. 


[ 157 ] 


CHAPTER XII 


THE REVOLUTION 


Y OU will remember that the great French 
lords and the bishops and the rich monasteries 
paid no taxes, and that the French king and 
queen had to depend for their luxury and extrava¬ 
gance on taxes which they forced the merchants and 
the poor working people to pay. Things, at last, 
came to such a pass that not another penny could 
be forced from these unlucky people, and for four 
years the French king had to get on, as best he 
could, on borrowed money. In the year 1787 no 
more money could be borrowed and no more money 
could be collected by the tax collectors. The king’s 
ministers suggested that the great nobles must at 
last be compelled to pay something to the king. 
This suggestion made the great nobles very angry, 
and they demanded that the States-General, a body 
something like the American Congress, should be 
called together and should be asked to consider the 
best thing to be done for poor bankrupt France. 
The States-General had not been called together 
for nearly two hundred years. It met in May, 1789, 
[158] 



MARIE ANTOINETTE LED TO EXECUTION 






















































































* 











THE REVOLUTION 


and its meeting was the beginning of the French 
Revolution. The States-General consisted of three 
orders: the great lords, the bishops and priests, and 
“the third estate,” which represented all the other 
people in the country—the merchants, the lawyers, 
the doctors, and the labouring folk. When the 
States-General met at Versailles they said that the 
king must not levy any more taxes without their 
consent. The king was very angry at this and 
wished that he had never called the States-General 
together at all. Indeed, he told the members to go 
home, but they said that they would not go home 
until they had found some way to govern France 
justly and properly and to make the French people 
happy and prosperous. At this, the king ordered 
his soldiers to break up the meetings of the States- 
General, but the soldiers refused to obey. 

The people of France were very angry with the 
king when they had heard what he had done. In 
Paris and in the other large cities, the workmen 
and the merchants and the shop-assistants armed 
themselves to resist the king and to establish liberty 
in France. In Paris, the people stormed the Bas¬ 
tille, the great grim prison in which the French 
kings had put their enemies for generations. You 
can read all about the storming of the Bastille in 
Charles Dickens’s great novel, A Tale of Two 

[ 159 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

Cities , and about the cruel things which were done 
to the poor prisoners who were kept there by the 
French king. The Bastille was taken and destroyed 
by the people of Paris on July 14, 1789, and July 
14 is still the great national holiday in France. 
While the people of Paris were destroying this ter¬ 
rible prison, the people in the country were driving 
away the landlords who had oppressed them, burn¬ 
ing down their houses and declaring that, in future, 
the land must belong to the people who ploughed it 
and sowed the seed and afterwards gathered the 
harvest. Some of these great landlords joined the 
king at Versailles, but many of them ran away 
from France altogether. The States-General had 
now formed themselves into what was called a 
National Assembly, and for two years, under the 
leadership of a great Frenchman called Mirabeau, 
this National Assembly tried to bring order and 
prosperity to the country. It abolished serfdom, 
which means the slavery of the country labourer to 
his landlord. It decided that, in future, the great 
lords and the great bishops should pay taxes as well 
as every one else, and it decided that the poor man 
should have the same chance of justice and fair 
dealing as the rich man. Unfortunately, the 
National Assembly could not provide food for the 
hungry people. The people of Paris wanted bread, 
[160] 


THE REVOLUTION 

and there was no bread in the bakers’ shops. They 
believed that there was plenty of bread in the palace 
of Versailles, and they believed that King Louis 
XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and their 
friends were plotting to destroy the National As¬ 
sembly and to restore the old tyranny and the old 
luxury and extravagance. So, one rainy day, hun¬ 
dreds and hundreds of hungry women marched out 
of Paris and went to Versailles. They stood for 
hours outside the palace in the rain, demanding 
that the king should come and talk to them and 
should give them bread. The king and queen were 
very frightened. They ordered their carriages to 
be got ready—you will remember, of course, that 
there were no railway trains or motor-cars in those 
days—and they planned to escape from Versailles 
away to the city of Metz, which you will see from 
the map is on the extreme eastern side of France. 
But a number of the men of Paris, who had armed 
themselves and who were now called the National 
Guard, had gone to Versailles with the women. 
They were commanded by General Lafayette, who, 
you remember, had fought with Washington in 
America to make the United States a free and 
independent country. These National Guards pre¬ 
vented the king and queen from escaping, and they 
insisted that Louis and Marie Antoinette should so 

[ 161 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

back with the women to Paris and should live in the 
palace, which was called Tuileries, in the middle of 
the city. So a procession was formed of the women 
and the National Guards and the king and queen 
and many wagon-loads of food. 

The king and queen arrived at the Tuileries on 
October 6 , 1789. The National Assembly went on 
trying to do good things for the country. It abol¬ 
ished the torturing of prisoners. It made it possible 
for all men to worship God in their own way with¬ 
out persecution. It made a law that no man should 
be sent to prison without a fair trial. But the great 
Mirabeau died, and the king and queen went on 
plotting to bring back the bad old things that had 
existed before the National Assembly met. The 
great nobles and landlords who had escaped from 
France had gathered together at the German town 
of Coblentz, near the eastern frontier of the coun¬ 
try. The King of Prussia and the King of Austria, 
who were very angry with the French people for 
taking away authority from their own king, gave 
these exiles arms and promised to send soldiers with 
them to destroy the new liberty in France. Louis 
XVI and Marie Antoinette were continually writ¬ 
ing letters to these great nobles at Coblentz and 
receiving letters from them, and in the year 1791 
they left Paris secretly and tried to reach their 
[162] 


THE REVOLUTION 

friends. They were captured, however, and brought 
back to Paris, and, from that moment, the French 
people made up their minds that the king, who, they 
hoped, would help them to make a new, happy and 
contented France, was really their enemy and 
wanted to destroy all the good new things and to 
restore all the bad old things. A great many of the 
French people said that they would not have a king 
at all. They said, as the English said when they 
beheaded Charles I, that kings were not to be 
trusted and that France must be a republic, with 
rulers, whom the French people would choose for 
themselves. The leaders of these republicans were 
three men called Danton, Robespierre and Marat. 
I think it is most likely that, if you have been told 
about these three men, most of the things you have 
heard of them are quite untrue. Each of them 
wanted very badly to make his country happy, and 
none of them cared very much about his own selfish 
interests. In this respect, Robespierre and Danton 
and Marat were much better than the king and 
queen, who were always thinking about their own 
selfish interests and never about the French people. 
Robespierre and Danton were lawyers. Marat was 
a Swiss doctor, who had been partly educated in 
England. 

In 1792 France began a war against Austria and 

[163] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

Prussia. This war was a very foolish step, and it is 
a little difficult to understand why the French, who 
had so many troubles at home and who were busy 
trying to make a new kind of government, should 
have wanted to make things more difficult by a 
costly and dangerous war. The Prussians and the 
Austrians were delighted. They crossed the French 
frontier, declaring that they intended to give back 
to Louis XVI all the power that the National 
Assembly had taken away from him. The French 
armies that were sent to fight the Austrians and the 
Prussians were all defeated. The fortress of Ver¬ 
dun, which the Germans failed to take in the Great 
War, was captured, and the French began to think 
that their enemies would reach Paris. The people 
of Paris were panic-stricken. They believed—and 
I think you will feel this belief was quite reason¬ 
able—that the king and queen and their friends 
were in league with the enemy. Many of the king’s 
friends were put into prison, and the mob broke 
into the prison and killed them all. Immediately 
after this, a French army defeated the Prussians 
and drove them across the Rhine. 

Another meeting of representatives of the French 
people, this time called the National Convention, 
met on September 1 , 1792, and declared that 
France was a Republic and would have no more 
[164] 


THE REVOLUTION 

kings. Louis XVI, like the English Charles I, 
was tried and condemned to death. He was, as 
I have told you, a foolish man, who would have 
been quite happy and harmless if he had not been 
born a king. I daresay you will think that it was 
a wicked thing to kill such a harmless man, but k 
it often happens in this world that people, who do 
not really mean to do any harm, become, almost 
against their own will, most troublesome and mis¬ 
chievous. If the French people had allowed Louis 
XVI to leave France, he would certainly have 
joined the great French lords who were now exiles, 
and would have encouraged Austria and Prussia 
to invade France and destroy the new Government. 
If they had allowed him to live on in France, they 
knew he would be always plotting to win back his 
old authority. So the poor man had to have his 
head cut off by the guillotine, a machine for killing 
people, which the new French Government had 
adopted. 

The death of Louis XVI had most important 
consequences. In the days of the old kings, the 
common people in France had not thought very 
much or cared very much about their country. 
You will remember that Louis XIV had said “I 
am the nation,” and all that the common people 
had to do was to give their money to the king and 

[165] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

obey his orders. But when Louis XVI was killed, 
the French people began to realize that France, 
with its vineyards and its fertile fields, with its 
mountains and its plains, with its great cities and 
its little villages, with its fine rivers and its sea¬ 
ports, belonged to the French people. France was 
theirs, and immediately the whole nation was 
determined that France should remain theirs and 
should not be overrun by its enemies. A poet 
called Rouget de Lisle wrote a splendid song 
called The Marseillaise, which I am sure you have 
heard, and from every town and village in the 
country crowds of young and middle-aged men 
hurried to join the armies at the frontiers, singing 
The Marseillaise as they trudged along the dusty 
roads. In old wars, the king had to send out and 
compel men to become soldiers. Now every 
healthy man in France was a volunteer. They did 
not care what discomforts they suffered. They did 
not grumble if they had poor food to eat or if they 
had to sleep out in the fields without any tents. 
France was not the king’s any more. France was 
theirs, and they wanted to fight for their own. 

While the death of Louis XVI had this magical 
effect on the French people, it made all the other 
kings in Europe furiously angry. The Austrians 
and the Prussians once more sent their armies to 
[ 166 ] 


LOUIS XVI AND HIS FAMILY IN HIS PRISON IN THE TEMPLE 













































































































ii I ■' 






’ I B Ju | a I I 




THE REVOLUTION 


invade France, and, after a little while, the English 
joined with them. A great many people in Eng¬ 
land were very glad when the French Revolution 
took place and when the French people began to 
destroy the tyranny of the French king. But the 
English Government was very angry when Louis 
XVI was executed, and they sent the French Am¬ 
bassador in London out of the country. This en¬ 
raged the French, and France declared war on 
England, a very unfortunate thing, because, during 
the many years of fighting that followed, it was al¬ 
ways the English navy that prevented the French 
from winning complete victory. 

The new enthusiastic Republican armies, how¬ 
ever, won every battle that they fought. They 
drove the Austrians out of Belgium, and they made 
Holland into a republic. They held their frontiers 
firm against the enemy, and no invader was able 
to set foot on French soil. All this, you will agree, 
was very splendid. But while things were going 
on so well with the army, terrible things were hap¬ 
pening in Paris and in other parts of France. 
Marat, who was, perhaps, the cleverest of the 
Republican leaders, was murdered in 1792 by a 
beautiful young girl called Charlotte Corday, who 
disagreed with his opinions and thought that he was 
hurting rather than helping her country. Char- 

[167] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


lotte was really quite wrong, and it was a great 
pity that Marat was killed, because, if he had lived, 
he would probably have saved the French from 
making many wicked mistakes. 

In the extreme west of France, in a district 
called La Vendee, in Lyons and in Marseilles and 
in other places, people tried to destroy the new 
Republic. These attempts were suppressed with 
ruthless cruelty. The guillotine was set up, and 
great nobles, bishops and priests, as well as mer¬ 
chants and lawyers and workmen, were executed 
without any sort of fair trial. Gradually Robes¬ 
pierre became the master of the country. He was 
an honest man who was always very ill, who was 
very conceited, who really wanted to make France 
happy and prosperous, but who foolishly thought 
that this could be done by cruelty and wickedness. 
Robespierre determined that everybody who was 
an enemy of the new Government should be put 
to death, and he naturally supposed that everybody 
who did not quite agree with him was an enemy 
of the country and ought to be killed. First, 
Queen Marie Antoinette was executed, then all the 
Republicans, who, much as they loved the new kind 
of government thought that killing was wicked; 
and, finally, Danton himself, the man who, more 
than any other man, had filled the French armies 
[ 168 ] 


THE REVOLUTION 


with enthusiasm and had helped them to overcome 
their enemies. None of these people had justice 
or fair trial. The judges did what Robespierre 
ordered them, and they had always made up their 
minds to condemn the prisoners before the trials 
began. The courts were filled with people from 4 
the Paris slums, who had been brought up in 
poverty and misery and who had come to think 
that all this killing was a sort of punishment for 
the bad things that they and their fathers had suf¬ 
fered. In A Tale of Two Cities you will read 
how these trials were carried out and how unfair 
they were. 

At last, however, the people of Paris grew tired 
of the killing and began to hate Robespierre, who 
was responsible for it. He, in his turn, was 
arrested. He, in his turn, had an utterly unfair 
trial, and he, in his turn, was taken to the guillotine. 
The death of Robespierre brought what is called 
“The Terror” to an end. It had lasted about two 
years, and during that time, four thousand people 
had been killed. Of these four thousand, quite 
half had really plotted against the new Govern¬ 
ment and had tried to help the enemies of France 
against whom the French soldiers were so valiantly 
fighting at the frontiers. “The Terror” was a very 
horrible thing, but I want you to feel that perhaps 

[169] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
it was not quite so horrible as English and 
American children have often been told, and that, 
though Robespierre was a foolish man, trying to 
do good through wicked ways, which no one can 
ever really do, there was some excuse for the people 
of Paris. 

Moreover, while “The Terror” went on, the Gov¬ 
ernment was busy trying to make France a happier 
place for the poor. It was arranged that every 
man should have a house to live in and that his 
wages should be sufficient to keep him and his 
family in comfort. Taxes were imposed on those 
who were best able* to pay them, and profiteers, 
who tried to make the people pay too much for their 
food, were severely punished. 

After the death of Robespierre, France still went 
on trying to find the right kind of government and 
the right men to be the rulers. The people of 
Paris had grown accustomed to arming themselves 
and marching to the place where the Parliament 
met, forcing its members to do what the mob de¬ 
sired. I am sure you will realize that no good 
government could possibly be carried out in this 
way. Towards the end of the year 1795 the mob 
once more marched to the meetings of the Con¬ 
vention. This time, it found itself faced by soldiers 
drawn up in order, with rifles and guns ready to be 
[170] 


THE REVOLUTION 

fired. The soldiers were commanded by a young 
officer, short, thin, with a very pale face and long 
lank hair. This officer’s name was Napoleon 
Bonaparte, and in the year 1795 he was just 
twenty-six years old. The people were ordered 
to go away. They refused. Whereupon Napo¬ 
leon Bonaparte gave an order and the soldiers 
fired. They only fired once, just “one whiff of 
grape-shot,” but it was enough to send the people 
back in terror to their homes. The power of the 
mob was broken. The authority of the Govern¬ 
ment was established. That “whiff of grape-shot” 
brought the French Revolution to an end, and was 
the beginning of the marvellous career of Napo¬ 
leon I. 


[171] 


CHAPTER XIII 


NAPOLEON 

I F you had been born a hundred and twenty 
years ago, when you were naughty your nurse 
would probably have tried to frighten you into 
being good by threatening you with “Boney.” This 
was the popular name of the extraordinary man 
whom we met for the first time at the end of the 
last chapter, and whose life is the most amazing 
story in modern history. I wonder if you remem¬ 
ber that I told you that Cardinal Mazarin, who, in 
the seventeenth century, did so much to destroy 
the power of the great French lords and to establish 
the power of the king, was an Italian. It is rather 
a queer coincidence that Napoleon Bonaparte, who 
made France more powerful than she had ever been 
before, and who made himself Emperor of the 
French, was also really an Italian, and spoke the 
Italian language long before he could speak 
French. Napoleon Bonaparte was born in the 
year 1769 in the island of Corsica, which you will 
find on your map in the Mediterranean Sea, south 
of the south coast of France. His father was a 


NAPOLEON 

poor lawyer. His mother was a very clever, 
strong-willed woman, who always made her many 
children obey her instantly, and who actually 
birched the great Napoleon when he was sixteen. 
Although the people of Corsica spoke Italian, the 
island belonged to France, and Napoleon was sent 
to a military school in France where he was trained 
to be an officer in the artillery. This was just 
before the Revolution. He became friendly with 
Robespierre’s brother, and during “The Terror” 
he was made commander of the artillery in the 
French army in Italy. When Robespierre died, 
Napoleon had not one single important friend. 
He came to Paris in 1795, very poor, very thin, 
with his overcoat in holes and with his boots un¬ 
brushed. It was by sheer accident that he was 
given command of the soldiers who drove away 
the mob with the “whiff of grape-shot.” This 
service, of course, made him very popular with the 
men who had succeeded Robespierre, and who were 
then governing France. About the same time he 
married a very beautiful widow called Josephine de 
Beauharnais, who was almost as poor as he was 
himself, but who had many important and power¬ 
ful friends. 

At this time, the French army in Italy was not 
doing very well. It had failed over and over again 

[173] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

to win victories and to defeat the enemies of the 
country. The Government in Paris felt that noth¬ 
ing could be done unless they could find a new 
and a clever general, and they decided to try this 
young man, Napoleon Bonaparte, with his livid 
complexion, bowed shoulders and sickly appear¬ 
ance. The soldiers received him without any 
enthusiasm. They had never heard of him before. 
No one indeed had ever heard of him except a few 
people in Paris. But Napoleon had not been in 
Italy very long before the soldiers discovered that, 
at last, they were commanded by a great man. 
Most of the officers were much older than he was, 
but he made them obey him. He inspired the sol¬ 
diers with faith and enthusiasm. He fought the 
Austrians six times in fifteen days and beat them 
every time, and he finished his first campaign with 
a treaty which made the new French Government 
more powerful and more secure than it had been 
before. People realized that Republican France 
had found a great man, and the nations of Europe 
were eager to make peace. Napoleon returned to 
Paris at the end of the year 1797. The hungry 
ill-clad officer of artillery was now a man to be 
respected and feared. Streets were named in his 
honour, and his mother and all his brothers and 
sisters came from the south and settled in Paris, 
[174] 



NAPOLEON CROSSING THE ALPS 


By Delaroche 
















' 






















* 


















































* 






















NAPOLEON 

sharing his glory and his position. The men who 
were ruling the country grew afraid of Napoleon. 
They realized that he was far more clever than they 
were, and that if they were not careful, he would 
soon take away their authority and rule France in 
their place. So they began to think how they could 
get rid of him. Of all the enemies of France, one 
only remained in arms against her—England—and 
it was suggested that Napoleon should raise an 
army and attempt to conquer England. This 
idea, however, was given up and he was sent to 
Egypt. Egypt is on the road to India, and it was 
thought that if France held Egypt, she might cut 
the British Empire into two parts. Napoleon was 
fascinated by the idea. He knew all about Alex¬ 
ander the Great and Julius Csesar, and he wanted 
to be a great world conqueror like those men had 
been. Unfortunately, he forgot all about the 
British Navy. Fie managed to land his troops at 
Alexandria, the seaport of Egypt, and he won a 
great battle which made him master of the country. 
But while he was fighting on land, the English 
fleet, under the great Admiral Nelson, attacked 
the French ships and destroyed nearly all of them, 
so that instead of cutting the British Empire in 
halves, Napoleon himself was cut off from France. 
He fought more battles in Egypt and gained vie- 

[175] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

tories, but no good came of them, and at last he was 
obliged to leave his army behind and escape back 
home. This was in the year 1799. The Egyptian 
expedition was rash and stupid, and one begins to 
understand what a marvellous man Napoleon must 
have been when one remembers that its complete 
failure did not hinder his great career. 

He was hailed as a hero by the people of Paris, 
who had grown very weary of their weak and silly 
governors; and with the help of his brothers and 
of all the cleverest statesmen and soldiers in the 
country, Napoleon became on the 9th of November, 
1799, the ruler of the entire country. He was then 
only thirty years old and he was really not a 
Frenchman at all. He was called First Consul 
of the Republic, but he had all the power and 
authority of a king. Soldier though he was, he 
at once decided that he must bring peace to the 
country, which had now been at war for over ten 
years. He began by suppressing rebellions in 
France itself, and by destroying the brigands who 
infested the more remote parts of the country. 
Then he turned to the foreign enemies of France. 
He offered peace to Austria and to England. Both 
countries refused. So he put himself at the head 
of a French army and marched against the Austri¬ 
ans in Italy, completely defeating them at the 
[176] 


NAPOLEON 

Battle of Marengo, after having made a marvellous 
march with his soldiers across the snow-covered 
Alps. About the same time, the Austrians were 
also defeated by another French general at Hohen- 
linden. I daresay you have read the poem about 
this battle which begins: 

“Oh Linden, when the sun was low.” 

After this, Austria was glad to sign a peace 
treaty with France, and the next year (1802), Eng¬ 
land signed another peace treaty at the town of 
Amiens, and Napoleon was free to establish order 
in the country and to make laws which would bring 
happiness to the poor people. Never had France 
been so secure. Never had she less cause to fear 
the invasion of her territory. 

The roads of France had fallen into disrepair 
since the Revolution. Like the old Romans, Na¬ 
poleon was a great road-maker, and he understood 
how much the prosperity of a country depended on 
good means of communication. So now that he 
had a little leisure time, he set men to work on 
improving the roads all over the country and par¬ 
ticularly on those roads that led from France to 
Italy and from France to Germany. At the same 
time, other gangs of men were employed in digging 

[177] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

canals and in deepening and widening the French 
seaports. Napoleon made great improvements in 
the water supply of Paris, so that the population 
of the city might increase and there would still be 
plenty of water for the people to drink, and for 
washing the streets. He made a treaty with the 
Pope, which lasted over a hundred years, by which 
the French Government recognized the Roman 
Catholic religion as the religion of the majority of 
the people, and in return for their obedience to the 
country’s laws, the Government guaranteed to pay 
the bishops and priests their yearly salaries. Soon 
afterwards Napoleon made the same arrangement 
with the French Protestant ministers and with the 
Jewish Rabbis. These plans made all the religious 
teachers in the country the servants of the Govern¬ 
ment and made them inclined to do what the Gov¬ 
ernment wished them to do. Napoleon also in¬ 
stituted the Legion of Honour. It is still a great 
distinction to become a member of this Legion, 
and if you go to France you will see a number of 
men with little bits of red ribbon in their button¬ 
holes which show that they belong to it. Member¬ 
ship of the Legion of Honour is a reward for brave 
soldiers and sailors, clever writers and painters, and 
doctors, statesmen, kind nurses, and indeed for 
every one who does good service for his country. 

[178] 


NAPOLEON 

Most Frenchmen would sooner have the right to 
wear the little bit of red ribbon than to be given 
a large sum of money, and it was a fine idea of 
Napoleon to begin this splendid Legion. But the 
greatest work that Napoleon did, during the short 
time of peace, was to begin to draw up what is 
called the Code Napoleon, that is the list of laws 
which the people of France must obey. I have 
tried to show you in the course of my story how 
necessary laws are for the happiness of the nation. 
Indeed, they are so necessary that it is far better 
for a country to have bad laws than to have no 
laws at all. The Revolution had destroyed most 
of the old laws made by the French kings, and 
since then so many new laws had been made that 
the French people did not know what they were 
expected to do or when they were breaking the 
laws of their country. I cannot tell you here about 
the details of the 2281 laws included in the Code 
Napoleon, but you should remember that this Code 
gives the father of a family far more authority over 
his children than a father has in America, and that 
it assures the countryman in possession of the little 
plot of land which he cultivates. France depends 
on the food grown within its frontiers. The land 
of England is for the most part cut up into large 
farms, while the land of France is cut up into little 

[179] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
farms, each of which is cultivated by the farmer 
and his family. These little farmers are perhaps 
the most important people in France. When the 
Revolution came, it was their yearning to own their 
own land that made the dreams of Rousseau a 
reality, and they owe much of their security during 
the past hundred years to the laws of the Code 
Napoleon. These laws which Napoleon drew up 
were not only obeyed by the people of France, but 
they were considered so good that they were 
adopted by the Italians, by the Dutch, and by many 
o^ the Germans, and were copied by the Swiss and 
the Spaniards. Napoleon was a great conqueror, 
but he was more proud of his laws than of all his 
conquests, and certainly the people of Europe may 
half forgive him for the wars he waged, and the 
suffering those wars entailed, for the sake of the 
laws that he drew up, and the security that was the 
consequence of those laws. The Code Napoleon 
took many years to complete. It was begun after 
the Treaty of Amiens, when the whole of Italy, 
Switzerland and Holland were the obedient ser¬ 
vants of France, when Austria dared not raise 
her voice against her, and when England, though 
she was the mistress of the sea, could do nothing 
against France on land. 

In the year 1802 Napoleon was made First Con- 
[180] 


NAPOLEON 

sul for life, and he began to give great positions 
to his brothers, although they were not men of any 
great cleverness, and probably nobody would ever 
have heard of them if they had been somebody 
else’s brothers. In the next year, 1803, war again 
began between France and England. It was not 
altogether Napoleon’s fault that the Treaty of 
Amiens was broken. Certainly, England did not 
carry out what she had promised with regard to the 
island of Malta. England said that France also 
did not carry out her promise. The unhappy fact 
was that both sides feared and hated each other, 
that there was no good faith and no real desire 
for peace. In 1804 Napoleon assembled a great 
army at Boulogne with the idea of invading Eng¬ 
land. But Nelson destroyed the French Navy 
at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and, after that, 
England was safe from invasion, and Napoleon had 
to be content with victories on land. He became 
Emperor of the French in 1804, and was crowned 
by the Pope in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in 
Paris. This was a very wonderful thing when one 
remembers that Napoleon was then only thirty-five, 
and that he was the son of a poor Corsican lawyer. 

In 1805 he smashed the Austrians at Austerlitz, 
and in 1806 he smashed the Prussians at Jena and 
made himself the master of the whole of Europe 

[181] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
except Russia in the east and England in the west. 
He drove the old kings off their thrones and made 
his generals and marshals into new kings. One 
of his brothers was made King of Spain, and an¬ 
other was made King of Holland, while his brother- 
in-law was made King of Naples. Russia at this 
time was governed by the Czar Alexander I, a 
young, kind-hearted, but not very wise man, who 
rather wanted all people to be free and happy, and 
was dazzled by Napoleon and his wonderful con¬ 
quests. He thought that it would be a fine idea 
if he and Napoleon could divide the continent of 
Europe between them, and for some time the two 
men were great friends. The czar joined in a great 
scheme to ruin Great Britain by excluding goods 
made in British factories from all ports on the 
continent, but this great scheme was a great failure. 
Though it hurt Great Britain and the British 
people a little, it hurt the continental countries 
much more. 

Napoleon was now at the height of his glory. 

1 He wanted to secure the throne of France, not 
only for himself but for his children, and, to do 
this, he divorced his wife, the beautiful Josephine 
de Beauharnais, and married the daughter of the 
Emperor of Austria. The poor Corsican lawyer’s 
son thus became the son-in-law of the haughtiest 
[ 182 ] 


NAPOLEON 


king in the world. But, though Napoleon had 
overrun practically all Europe and had conquered 
kings and armies, he had not destroyed the feeling 
all nations have that it is a horrible thing to be 
governed by foreigners and to be forced to obey 
foreign rulers. The people of Spain hated having 
Napoleon’s brother as their king, and, with the 
help of an English Army, commanded by the Duke 
of Wellington, they fought for years against the 
French soldiers, and slowly, but surely, drove them 
out of their country. The Prussians, too, although 
they had been beaten at Jena, soon began to pull 
themselves together and to prepare to fight the 
French again. 

In the year 1811, the Czar Alexander quarrelled 
with Napoleon, and, at once, Napoleon gathered 
together a great army and began to march eastward 
for the conquest of Russia. All the wisest men, 
whom he had about him, warned him that this was 
a terribly foolish thing to do. But Napoleon had 
become mad with ambition. He cared no longer 
about the happiness of the French people. He 
would not listen when people told him that the 
French were tired of fighting and conquests, and 
that they wanted peace and quiet. He just wished 
to be the greatest conqueror that the world had 
ever seen, and he was determined that Russia, as 

[ 183 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

well as the rest of Europe, should obey his orders. 
The great army that he collected for the invasion 
of Russia was not all French. Italians, Germans 
and Austrians were forced to serve in it, and, of 
course, they went with very ill will and did not 
care one bit whether Napoleon lost or won, so long 
as they themselves were not killed. The invasion 
of Russia was a terrible disaster. Napoleon won 
battles and succeeded in reaching the city of Mos¬ 
cow, but all the people left the city before the con¬ 
queror arrived, and then most of the houses were 
set on fire. Napoleon was forced to retreat. But 
the terrible Russian winter had begun. Napo¬ 
leon’s army was frost-bitten and had nothing to eat, 
and out of the thousands and thousands of men 
who had started on this expedition, only a few hun¬ 
dreds of ragged, hungry fugitives returned home. 

Napoleon hurried to Paris, but all Europe was 
now at his heels, and the French people were weary 
of his rule. He won a great battle at Dresden, 
and lost a great battle at Leipzig, and in the year 
1814, Swedes and Germans and Austrians and 
Russians crossed the river Rhine and marched into 
France from the east, while the Spaniards and the 
English crossed the Pyrenees and marched into 
France from the south. Napoleon could fight no 
longer. He was obliged to surrender to his 
[184] 


NAPOLEON 

enemies at Fontainebleau, a town a few miles from 
Paris, and to say that he was no longer Emperor. 
He was sent away to the little island of Elba in 
the Mediterranean, and the allies, whose armies 
remained in France, sent for the brother of Louis 
XVI, a good-natured, gouty and lazy old gentle¬ 
man, and made him King of France under the title 
of Louis XVIII. 

The French people were weary of Napoleon, but 
they certainly did not want Louis XVIII. After 
eleven months, Napoleon escaped from Elba and 
came back to France. Most of the people of 
France were glad to see him and thousands of 
his old soldiers gathered round him. But the allies 
were too strong for him. His army was defeated 
at the Battle of Waterloo by the British, under 
the Duke of Wellington, and by the Prussians, 
under Prince Bliicher. Once more Napoleon had 
to surrender. This time he was sent far away to 
the island of St. Helena, off the east coast of Africa, 
where he remained until his death in 1821. Na¬ 
poleon was the prisoner of the English at St. 
Helena, and one of these days, when you read how 
he was treated there, you will be sorry that this 
great man, fallen on bad times, should have been 
treated so badly, even though it were true that he 
had brought much suffering to his fellows, and that 

[185] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

he had really cared for little but his own glory 
and honour. For, after all, Napoleon did great 
service to France, and, wherever his soldiers 
marched they took new ideas to the people, so 
that never afterwards were these people willing to 
accept the rule of stupid kings, or to be content 
to do as they were told without question or protest. 

The French Revolution brought new light into 
the world, and Napoleon’s armies spread that light. 
As for the man himself, he was one of the greatest 
soldiers who ever lived in the history of the world. 
He always knew exactly what he wanted, and he 
did not care in the least what means he used to 
obtain his end. He was very selfish and extraor¬ 
dinarily clever, with a rare power of understanding 
exactly what every other man could do and what 
he was worth. Unhappily, like the kings who went 
before him, like the English Henry V and like the 
French Louis XIV, he loved fighting and conquests 
for their own sakes, and he thought his own per¬ 
sonal glory the one thing that mattered. If he had 
died ten years before Waterloo, or if he had cared 
for France more and for himself less, Napoleon 
might have been remembered as the greatest bene¬ 
factor that a great nation ever had. 


[ 186 ] 


CHAPTER XIV 

THE NINETEENTH CENTUBY 

1 0UIS XVIII had run away when Napoleon 
j escaped from Elba and landed again in 
France. After the Battle of Waterloo, and 
after Napoleon had surrendered to the English, 
Louis XVIII came back once more to France. 
English, German, Austrian and Russian soldiers 
were camped in the city of Paris, and it was these 
foreign soldiers who made Louis XVIII King of 
France. When Charles II came back to England, 
after the death of Oliver Cromwell, he was wel¬ 
comed by most of the people of England, who were 
glad that he should be their king. But very few 
of the people of France really wanted Louis 
XVIII. They were, indeed, in great doubt and 
difficulty. They hardly knew what sort of govern¬ 
ment they did want. They were quite sure, how¬ 
ever, that they did not want the English, German, 
Austrian and Russian soldiers to stop in the coun¬ 
try, and since these soldiers had promised to go 
away if the French accepted Louis XVIII as their 
king, they thought it wise to make the best of a bad 

[187] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

bargain. Louis XVIII was a very worldly-wise, 
■kind-hearted old gentleman. Like the English 
Charles II, he was tired of living as an exile in 
foreign countries, and he promised to let the French 
people keep some of the rights and liberties which 
they had won in the Revolution and had managed 
to hold on to, during the time of Napoleon, if only 
they would let him be their king. So it happened 
that while Louis XVIII lived the people of France 
were fairly happy and content. He died in 1824, 
and his brother, Charles X, became the King of 
France. Charles X was much more obstinate and 
old-fashioned than Louis XVIII. He wanted to 
make things in France exactly as they had been 
fifty years before. He wanted to give back all 
the old privileges to the great lords and to the 
bishops, and to take away the new liberties from 
the merchants and the working people. All the 
kings of France, right down to Charles X, were 
the descendants of the great Henry IV, and they 
belonged to a family called the Bourbons. It has 
been said of these Bourbons that they never learned 
anything and that they never forgot anything. 
You will agree with me, tfiat people who never 
learn and never forget are very silly people, certain 
to get into trouble. Charles X paid for never 
learning and never forgetting by being driven by 
[188] 


THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 


the people from the throne of France in the year 
1830, in what is called the second French Revolu¬ 
tion. He escaped to Scotland, and from there he 
went to Austria, where he died six years later. 

Since the great Revolution of 1789 the French 
have continually changed their kind of government, 
always trying to find out how best to ensure that 
the country shall be prosperous and the people shall 
be happy. The French love making experiments. 
When they drove Charles X from the throne, they 
said that this time they would have a government 
like the government of England, in which the king 
should have very little power, and most of the 
power should be in the hands of a Parliament 
chosen by the people. They selected for their king 
a man called Louis Philippe, who was a cousin of 
Louis XVIII and Charles X. 

During the troubles of the Revolution, Louis 
Philippe’s father, the Duke of Orleans, had tried 
to save his own head by pretending to be on the 
side of the Revolutionists against the king. He 
had even gone so far as to vote for the execution 
of his cousin, Louis XVI, when that unlucky man 
was tried by the National Convention. The Duke 
of Orleans was a very cowardly, wicked person, 
and it is rather pleasant to know that all his plotting 
did him very little good, and that he, also, was 

[ 189 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
beheaded by the Revolutionists. During the Rev¬ 
olution his son, Louis Philippe, had been a school¬ 
master in Switzerland, and had also lived and 
earned his living in America. He had grown very 
tired of exile, and he was only too willing to accept 
the position of a Constitutional King, of a king, 
that is, who does not try to make his people do 
what he orders them to do, but who is ready to join 
with Parliament in helping the people to govern 
themselves. Louis Philippe was called “the citizen 
king,” and he managed to remain King of France 
for seventeen years. He was rather a mean man, 
and hated all show and splendour. At the begin¬ 
ning of his reign he was very popular with the 
merchants and shopkeepers, who liked to have a 
king who looked exactly as they looked, and who 
always carried an umbrella when he went out for 
a walk. But as time went on, the French people 
grew tired of Louis Philippe. They had not for¬ 
gotten the glory of Napoleon, and they had not 
forgotten either how, in Napoleon’s day, the whole 
of Europe was afraid of France. Nobody feared 
or respected France while Louis Philippe was king. 
Sometimes, indeed, he nearly succeeded in stirring 
up trouble with other countries, and, more than 
once, during his reign England and France were 
very bad friends. But, generally, the years be- 
[190] 


FLIGHT OF LOUIS PHILIPPE FROM PARIS, 1848 



































































































































































































THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

tween 1831 and 1848 were dull years. One of the 
really important things that happened was when 
the body of the Great Napoleon was brought back 
from the island of St. Helena and buried with 
great pomp in the Invalides in Paris. All France 
welcomed back the great emperor, and as the re¬ 
mains were carried through the streets of the city, 
everybody compared the emperor, who had half 
conquered the world, with the little dull king who 
preferred his umbrella to a sword. Louis Philippe, 
too, was not content to carry out the bargain which 
he had made with the French people. He tried to 
get more power into his own hands, and to take 
away from the power of the Parliament. So at 
last, in 1848, another Revolution occurred. The 
French people once again rose against the king, 
and, like Charles X, Louis Philippe was obliged 
to hurry out of France and take refuge in England, 
where he lived until his death. I ought to tell you 
that during the reign of Louis Philippe, the first 
railways had been built in France, and that France 
had acquired her colony of Algeria in Northern 
Africa. Perhaps you will remember that France 
lost most of her colonies in Canada and in India 
in the eighteenth century, and her seizure of Algeria 
was the beginning of another colonial empire. 

After the Revolution of 1848 the French people 

[191] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 


said they would make another experiment, and that 
this time France should be a Republic like the 
United States of America, with a president chosen 
by the people instead of a king. As you grow 
older, I expect you will learn that it very rarely 
happens that there is more than one very clever man 
in the same family. The great Napoleon had, as 
I have told you, many brothers, but most of them 
were quite silly men, without any of their great 
brother’s wonderful cleverness. So, when Napo¬ 
leon died, there was for a long time no one in his 
family who was either clever enough or brave 
enough to try to carry on the Napoleonic rule in 
France. Napoleon, however, had a nephew, the 
son of his brother Louis, whom for a little while 
he made King of Holland, who inherited some of 
his uncle’s cleverness as well as his name. He was 
only a very little boy at the time of the Battle of 
Waterloo, but as he grew up he became more and 
more determined to try and make himself Emperor 
of France. He was educated in Germany, and it 
is rather a curious thing that this second Napoleon 
always spoke French with a German accent, just 
as Napoleon I spoke French with an Italian accent. 
Until 1848, Louis Napoleon was not allowed to 
live in France. He landed in the country twice, 
and once was arrested and kept for some time in 
[192] 


THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 


prison, but most of the time he lived in England, 
spending his time enjoying himself. Most people 
thought he was just an idle fellow with no other 
ambition than to have what idle people regard as 
“a good time,” but all the while that Louis Napo¬ 
leon was living in England, he was thinking how 
he could get back to France and make himself ruler 
of the country. The moment that Louis Philippe 
was compelled to leave France, Louis Napoleon 
returned. 

The French people were weary of Bourbons and 
of dull kings who carried umbrellas, as I have 
already told you, they often thought regretfully 
of the glorious days of Napoleon, and they gladly 
welcomed his nephew back again, and at once 
elected him the President of the Republic. But 
that did not satisfy Louis Napoleon. He wanted 
to be more than President. So he first of all got 
the soldiers on his side. Then he arrested all the 
members of the French Parliament who were 
against him. Then he persuaded the French 
people to elect him President for ten years, and 
finally, in 1852, he persuaded them to vote that 
he should be an emperor like his uncle. The Bour¬ 
bon kings were forced on to the French people by 
foreign soldiers, but the French people themselves 
decided that Napoleon III should be their emperor. 

[ 193 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

Nearly eight million men voted for him, and only 
a quarter of a million voted against him. Napo¬ 
leon III was a clever man, but, unfortunately, he 
did not believe in anything, not even in himself. 
He did not think it mattered very much whether 
people were good or bad, honest or dishonest, so 
long as they were clever and amusing. He under¬ 
stood that the French people had grown tired of 
Louis Philippe because nothing much happened 
during his reign and everything was very dull. 
So he made up his mind that the French people 
should always be amused, and that the Court should 
be magnificent, and that there should be processions 
and pageants to please the people, and to make 
them forget that they had lost some of their liber¬ 
ties. He married a beautiful Spanish woman, 
called Eugenie de Monti jo. Afterwards France 
seemed to be more prosperous than she had ever 
been before. Napoleon was anxious, like his uncle, 
to interfere with the affairs of other European 
countries. He was not content merely to be the 
Emperor of the French and to make France happy 
and prosperous: he was envious of his uncle’s mili¬ 
tary glory, and he also wanted to be a great con¬ 
queror. 

First of all, he joined with the English in the 
war against Russia in the Crimea. Then he inter- 
[194] 


THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

fered in Italy, where the people were striving to 
make their country united and free. Napoleon 
really did not know quite what to do in Italy. At 
the bottom of his heart, he was on the side of the 
people and against the old-fashioned kings and 
emperors. But, unfortunately for him, the Pope 
was the great enemy of Italian liberty, and Na¬ 
poleon could not afford to offend the Pope, because 
it was the votes of the pious Catholics in France 
that had made him emperor. So he supported first 
one side and then the other, until both sides sus¬ 
pected him. However, he won one great victory 
over the Austrians, who were the great oppressors 
of the Italians, at Solferino, and this victory gave 
him at least a shadow of his uncle’s military glory. 
He made friends with Queen Victoria, and the 
English and the French were, perhaps, better 
friends during his reign than they had ever been 
before. But as time went on the French people 
grew weary of Napoleon’s extravagance, and they 
were no longer satisfied with the shows that he 
arranged for them nor pleased by his military glory. 
They were angry when he sent French soldiers to 
Mexico to compel the Mexicans to accept an em¬ 
peror whom they did not want. They were angry 
with him for seizing all power and authority for 
himself, just as if he were one of the old kings, and 

[ 195 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
they grew more and more eager to govern them¬ 
selves. 

While France was being made poor and weak 
by Napoleon’s extravagance and his love of wars, 
the kingdom of Prussia in North Germany was 
growing stronger and stronger. The Prussians 
had been conquered by the First Napoleon, and 
they were very eager to avenge themselves on his 
nephew. At the head of the Prussian Government 
there was a clever statesman called Prince Bis¬ 
marck, and Prince Bismarck quietly plotted for 
years to destroy the power of France and to make 
Prussia the most important country in Europe. 
Napoleon III grew very ill and tired. The men 
who helped him to govern France were not half 
as clever as Prince Bismarck, and his wife, the 
beautiful Empress Eugenie, was continually per¬ 
suading him to do stupid things. Bismarck care¬ 
fully arranged a quarrel, and a war broke out be¬ 
tween France and Prussia in the year 1870. All 
the rest of the Germans—the Saxons, the Bava¬ 
rians, the Wiirtembergers and so on—fought on 
the side of the Prussians, but the French had to 
fight alone. Their army was not fit to fight, while 
the Prussians had been preparing for the war for 
years. The French Generals were not good, and 
the consequence was that the French were beaten 
[196] 


THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

in one battle after the other, until their army was 
practically destroyed at Sedan and Napoleon him¬ 
self was taken prisoner. After this battle the Ger¬ 
man armies marched to Paris and surrounded the 
city. The siege lasted for many weeks, and the 
city did not surrender until the people were nearly 
starving. They were obliged to eat dogs and cats 
and horses, and even rats and mice and the animals 
in the Zoological Gardens. At last they could 
hold out no longer, and the German soldiers 
marched into Paris, marching under the great Arc 
de Triomphe, which you can still see at the top of 
the Champs Elysees, and which the Great Napo¬ 
leon had built to celebrate his victories. 

Napoleon III never went back to France. He 
escaped to England and died at Chislehurst. The 
Prussians stopped in France for a long time, and 
they did not go out of the country until France 
had promised to pay them a very large sum of 
money and to surrender to them the provinces of 
Alsace and Lorraine on her eastern border. After 
Napoleon had surrendered to the Germans, the 
people of Paris endeavoured to set up a govern¬ 
ment of their own, which would have made the city 
half independent of the rest of the country, and 
which would at the same time have established in 
the city what is called Socialism, which means that 

[197] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

there would no longer have been rich men who 
employed poor men to work for them, but that all 
men would have to work and that the money made 
by their work would have been divided between 
them. This revolution of the people of Paris is 
called the Commune. It was suppressed by sol¬ 
diers, brought from other parts of France, after 
a great many people had been killed. So you will 
see that poor France, after having lost thousands 
and thousands of men in the unhappy war against 
Germany, lost hundreds more in this quarrel be¬ 
tween her own sons. But the French are a won¬ 
derful and determined people, not easily beaten or 
discouraged. When the Germans had gone, and 
Paris was once more peaceful, they established an¬ 
other Republic, this time deciding that the presi¬ 
dent should only have just as little power as the 
King of England had. They paid the money 
which the Germans had demanded, and they once 
more set themselves to making their country happy 
and prosperous. The Third Republic has now 
lasted over fifty years. During that time it has 
had many presidents, but none of them has been 
more than the chosen head of the people, almost 
always quite content to carry out the people’s will. 
Once there was an attempt to bring back the Bour¬ 
bon kings, but that failed. At another time a sol- 
[198] 


THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 
dier, called General Boulanger, tried to make him¬ 
self into a Napoleon, but he failed too. 

In the later years of the last century France 
added to her colonial possessions, particularly in 
China. But generally, as the years went on, the 
nation remained quiet and the majority of the peo¬ 
ple were prosperous and comparatively content. 
For a long time the old enmity between England 
and France continued, and once, in the year 1898, a 
war almost took place between the two countries. 
An English army under Lord Kitchener was 
marching southward up the river Nile in Egypt 
towards the middle of Africa. When they came 
to Fashoda, which is little more than a village of 
mud huts, they found it already in the hands of a 
handful of French soldiers commanded by an officer 
called Captain Marchand. It seemed at first that 
the English and the French were going to fight for 
the possession of this mud village, but fortunately, 
thanks to the common-sense of Lord Kitchener, 
there was no fighting, and afterwards the matter 
was peacefully arranged between the two countries. 
If there had been a fight between the English and 
the French armies in the heart of Africa, it is quite 
likely that there might have been a great war be¬ 
tween the two peoples, because it has often hap¬ 
pened that great wars have begun over something 

[199] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

that really did not matter at all. After this little 
quarrel had been settled, it seemed to the English 
and the French that the time had come when the 
two great nations of the west of Europe, who both 
loved to be free and who had so many tastes in 
common, ought to be friends. King Edward VII 
of England, who hated wars and quarrels, went to 
France and talked things over with a French 
statesman called Delcasse, and the result of these 
conversations was the creation of a friendship be¬ 
tween the two countries, which was called the En¬ 
tente Cordiale, and which became, in the time of 
trouble and trial, an alliance between the French 
and the British people. 

France, of course, had her troubles like all other 
countries. There has often been bitter disagree¬ 
ments between the people who really did not like 
change very much, among whom the bishops and 
priests have generally been found, and the rest of 
the nation who want to alter things and make them 
better. But in the years fthat went before the 
beginning of the Great War, most of the French 
people were industriously working in their fields 
or in the factories, believing what they wanted to 
believe, thinking what they wanted to think, saying 
what they wanted to say, and being governed as 
they wanted to be governed. There were, of 
[ 200 ] 


THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 


course, many people in France, as there were every¬ 
where else, who were poor and unhappy, but the 
nation as a whole was prosperous and content, and 
it had entirely given up the dreams of glory and 
conquest which had brought so much trouble with 
them during the times of Louis XIV, Napoleon I, 
and Napoleon III. 

The real glory of a country depends much more 
on its great men who write beautiful books, paint 
beautiful pictures, and invent things which add 
to the comfort and happiness of the people, that 
it does on great soldiers or reat kings. I do not 
suppose that many of you have read very many 
French books, but when you get a little older you 
will read Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas and 
Theophile Gautier and Balzac and Flaubert and 
Alphonse Daudet and Emile Zola and Guy de 
Maupassant and Baudelaire and Paul Verlain and 
Ernest Renan and Anatole France; you will enjoy 
the pictures painted by Meissonier and Corot and 
Millet and Manet and Degas; you will listen to 
the music composed by Berlioz and Gounod and 
Bizet; you will learn about the work of Charcot, 
Pasteur, the Curies, and other men of science, and 
you will realize that these men, and not Louis 
Philippe nor Napoleon III nor the Presidents that 
followed them, were the glory that is France. 

[ 201 ] 


CHAPTER XV 

THE GREAT WAR 


T HE years between the Franco-German War 
of 1870 and the beginning of the Great War 
in 1914 are called the period of Armed Peace. 
In France and in Germany, in Russia and in all 
the countries on the Continent of Europe, every 
healthy man was compelled to be a soldier for a 
certain number of years. Each nation had a great 
army ready to fight whenever the rulers of the 
nation thought war would be a good thing. Some 
people believe that the best way to keep peace is 
always to be ready for war. But this is a false 
and dangerous idea. I feel sure you will under¬ 
stand that if a king always has a strong army 
ready to fight at his orders he will always be 
tempted to quarrel with his neighbours, and to try 
and steal countries which do not belong to him. 
I am afraid it will be difficult for me to make you 
understand all the causes that brought the Great 
War about. Perhaps you have heard people say 
that it was inevitable, which means that it had 
[ 202 ] 


THE GREAT WAR 


to happen like to-morrow’s sunrise. But that is 
wicked nonsense. Terrible things like wars do not 
have to happen. They occur because one man in 
authority is stupid, another man in authority is 
ambitious, and a third man in authority is selfish, 
while the people, who have to do the fighting and 
who suffer and die when wars do happen, have not 
learned to look after their own affairs and properly 
to arrange the world in which they live. 

After the Germans had beaten the French in 
1871 they grew very proud. They thought that 
the Germans were the best and most powerful 
people in the world, and that, therefore, all the 
rest of the world ought to be willing to follow 
Germany and to do what the German rulers wished. 
I have told you that the French and the English 
are both what is called mixed races, that they are 
partly descended from German tribes. The Ger¬ 
mans, although they pretended that they were dif¬ 
ferent from other people, are also a mixed race. 
They are partly Slavs (the Russians are altogether 
Slavs). Like the English and the French, they 
are partly Celts, and like the English and the 
French, they are partly descended from the old 
barbarians who, in the time of the Roman Empire, 
lived in Central Europe and on the shores of the 
Baltic Sea. The Germans are really no different 

[ 203 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

from the other European people, whose cousins 
they are and with whom they ought to have agreed. 

In 1871 the Germans made a treaty with the 
Emperor of Austria, and by this treaty the Ger¬ 
mans and the Austrians agreed to help each other 
in time of war. Later on Italy joined Germany 
and Austria, and the three countries formed what 
was called the Triple Alliance. It was very nat¬ 
ural that France should have been a little fright¬ 
ened of this Triple Alliance. The French people 
are so industrious, and they love their country so 
much, that they worked very hard after their defeat 
in 1870, and made their country richer than it had 
been before the war. They knew that Germany 
was very angry about this, and they knew that, at 
any moment, the Germans might start another war 
against them in order that France might be weak 
and helpless and that Germany might be the 
mistress of Europe. When Germany made an 
alliance with Austria and Italy, France made an 
alliance with the great Empire of Russia in order 
' to have friends on her side. You will think it 
rather a curious thing that the Republic of France, 
where the people chose their own rulers and made 
their own laws, should have joined with Russia, a 
country which was ruled by one man just as France 
was ruled in the time of Louis XIV. But war and 
[204] 


THE GREAT WAR 

the fear of war drive men and nations to very queer 
and sometimes very foolish actions. You will see, 
therefore, that just before the Great War the great 
nations of Europe were divided into two sides: 
Germany, Austria and Italy on one side, and 
Russia and France on the other side. England 
was very friendly with France and very suspicious 
about what Germany might do. Her friendship 
with France made her friendly with France’s 
friend, Russia, but nobody quite knew what Eng¬ 
land would do if a war were to break out. The 
French hoped and believed that the English would 
fight on their side. The Germans hoped and be¬ 
lieved that England would not fight at all. Perhaps, 
if the English had said right out that if Germany 
attacked France her soldiers and her sailors would 
fight for the French, the German rulers would 
have thought twice before they started the war, 
and all the terrible things that occurred in the 
black years 1914 to 1918 would never have hap¬ 
pened at all. 

Although during the period of the Armed Peace, 
each European nation had its big army and its big 
navy, very few people wanted war and very few 
people believed there would be war. For some 
years after 1870, a good many of the French people, 
inspired by a poet called Paul Deroulede, dreamt 

[205] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

of revenging themselves against the Germans and 
of winning back the provinces that had been taken 
away by them. But as time went on, and as the 
men who fought in 1870 died, the French people 
' gave up this idea of revenge altogether, and just 
wanted to live in peace and to make their country 
happy and prosperous. Nobody in France wanted 
war. Nobody in England wanted war. Nobody 
in Italy wanted war. And most of the people in 
Russia and Germany would much have preferred 
peace to continue. But the German Kaiser 
{Kaiser is the German word for Emperor ), like 
the English Henry V and the French Louis XIV 
and Napoleon, was always dreaming of glory and 
of making himself not only the ruler of Germany, 
but the most powerful man in the world. And the 
German generals and many of the German school¬ 
masters and a number of other important people in 
Germany also thought that war would be a capital 
thing. There were people, too, in Russia who also 
wanted war, some of them because they, too, dreamt 
of glory, some of them because they thought they 
would make money if there were a war, and some 
of them because they believed that, unless there 
were a war, the Russian people would revolt against 
their emperor as the French people had revolted 
against Louis XVI. The one great fact for you 
[ 206 ] 


THE GREAT WAR 


to remember is that Germany was ready for war, 
that all her plans were made and her army pre¬ 
pared, while none of the other nations was really 
ready. When people want to quarrel they always 
can easily find something to quarrel about, and I 
need not bother you with the excuses that Germany 
had for first declaring war against Russia on July 
30,1914, and then for at once sending a great army 
from the German town of Aix-la-Chapelle into 
Belgium in order to attack France. 

Poor little Belgium had nothing to do with the 
quarrel at all, but the easiest road for the German 
army to travel was through Belgium; and the Ger¬ 
mans, therefore, without bothering at all about 
what the Belgians thought, marched through their 
towns and villages, burning and killing as they 
went. The Germans did horrible and disgusting 
things in unhappy Belgium, but you must not for¬ 
get that, when people, who are generally quiet and 
peaceful, are compelled to fight in an unjust war, 
they nearly always behave themselves badly and 
wickedly. At the beginning, it looked as if the 
Germans would again crush France before the 
English could come to their help, and that the war 
would be over in a very few weeks. The German 
armies marched across the frontier of Belgium and 
France, and, by the beginning of September, 1914, 

[ 207 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

their armies occupied a large part of Northern 
France, including the great city of Lille, which 
is to the French what Manchester is to the English. 
For a little while they occupied Rheims, the town 
about which I have told you so much. It looked as 
if Paris itself would soon be taken by the German 
soldiers, but on September 6 the French army 
which, up to then, had been very badly led, struck 
a hard blow at the Germans, and with the help of 
a small British army, commanded by Lord French, 
won the Battle of the Marne. 

Paris was saved, but the French and their Eng¬ 
lish friends were not strong enough to drive the 
Germans entirely out of their country, and for 
nearly four years the Germans remained in France. 
Each side dug trenches and built strong forts and, 
day after day, the fighting went on, and more and 
more people were killed. The English army in 
France grew larger and larger; and in France 
and in Germany and in England the people who 
were not fighting were busy making guns and shells 
and aeroplanes, and nobody thought about any¬ 
thing but the war. In the year 1916 the Germans 
made another big effort to win a great victory. 
They tried to break through the French line at 
the town of Verdun. The fighting went on for 
months. Thousands of men were killed on each 
[208] 


THE GREAT WAR 

side, and at the end the Germans utterly failed. 
“They shall never pass,” said the French, and they 
never did. All the Allies who fought with France 
lost many thousands of men and were very much 
poorer than they would have been if the war had 
never taken place. But I want you always to 
remember that the fighting took place on French 
land, that the German soldiers held French cities 
and villages, and that, though all the Allies had 
terrible losses, the French losses were more terrible 
than any others. But no losses and no suffering 
could break the French spirit. “They shall never 
pass,” was the cry of the whole nation. Behind the 
fighting lines German aeroplanes and German 
“Zeppelins” dropped bombs on cities, as they did on 
English towns and cities, killing scores of women 
and children. Towards the end of the war the Ger¬ 
mans made a great gun, which dropped shells into 
the streets of Paris every day, killing more women 
and children. But still the French people repeated: 
“They shall never pass.” 

From the beginning the Austrians had fought 
on the side of the Germans, and the Russians as 
well as the English had fought on the side of the 
French. The Italians, however, although they 
were supposed to be the friends of the Germans, 
said that the German Emperor had no right to 

[209] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

begin the war and that they would not help him. 
In 1915 the Italians went over on to the other side 
and fought with the French and the English. The 
Russian soldiers are truly brave and patient, but 
y the generals who commanded the Russian army 
were very stupid, and the Austrians and the Ger¬ 
mans generally won the battles that they fought 
against the Russians. The Russian people at last 
grew tired of their stupid generals and of their 
stupid emperor and of the war. They revolted 
against the emperor, and in 1917 made a peace 
of their own with their enemies. When the Rus¬ 
sians went out of the war the Americans came to 
the help of the French, and sent a large army to 
Europe. It was this American army that helped 
so much to bring the war to an end. 

In the spring of 1918 the Germans made one last 
attempt to break the line, and they very nearly 
succeeded. Their soldiers almost got to the town 
of Amiens, and it once more looked as if Paris 
must be theirs. But under the leadership of Mar- 
^ shal Foch, the American, the British and the 
French hit back hard just at the moment when the 
Germans thought they had really won the war. 
Battle after battle was won, and the German sol¬ 
diers were at last forced to leave their trenches and 
to retire back towards their own country. The 
[ 210 ] 


THE GREAT WAR 

German army was worn out. The soldiers would 
not fight any more. The German Emperor ran 
away from his own country and took refuge in 
Holland, and, at last, on November 11, 1918, Eu¬ 
rope was once more at peace. And here I must 
finish my story. Never in the whole of their long 
history were the French people so patient, so brave, 
so dauntless, as they were during the Great War. 
The women were as brave as the men. The rich 
people joined with the poor people. The whole 
nation said together: “They shall not pass.” 

In 1919 the Germans were compelled to sign a 
Peace Treaty, which gave back to France the 
provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, taken away 
from her in 1871, and which also compelled the 
Germans to pay to France large sums of money 
to make good some of the destruction wrought by 
the German armies. This treaty was drawn up by 
a great Frenchman called Clemenceau, with the 
help of the Englishman, Mr. Lloyd George, and 
the American, President Wilson. It was signed in 
the palace which Louis XIV built at Versailles, in 
the summer of 1919. As you grow up, you will 
read a great deal about this Treaty of Versailles, 
and I dare say that you will think that, in some 
respects, it was not very wise or just. 

In this year, 1923, Germany is weak and broken, 

[ 211 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 
weaker than she was even after her defeats by the 
great Napoleon, and France is once more the most 
powerful nation in Europe. Some people say that 
France will use her new power badly as she did 
when Napoleon was the master of the world. But 
we remember that the French people love justice 
and liberty and peace, and we believe that, as the 
world settles down after the troubles of the Great 
War, the French people will join with the English 
and the Americans to make the world happier and 
better. 


[ 212 ] 


CHAPTER XVI 

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH 

F RANCE, like England and the United 
States, is now what is called a Democracy, that 
is to say, a country where the people choose 
their rulers and decide for themselves the laws that 
they will obey. France is governed by a President, 
a Senate, and a Chamber of Deputies, just as the 
English are governed by a King, a House of Lords, 
and a House of Commons. In France the mem¬ 
bers of the Chamber of Deputies are chosen by the 
people. The members of the Senate are chosen by 
the bodies who govern the different parts of France 
as our county councils govern the different parts of 
England. The members of these local councils are 
chosen by the people. The President is chosen by 
the members of the Senate and the members of the 
Chamber of Deputies together, and there is a new 
President every seven years. Besides the Senate 
and the Chamber of Deputies and the county coun¬ 
cils, there are in France town councils in the cities 
and parish councils in the villages to look after the 
roads and the drains, and so on. The members of 

[213] 


l THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

these councils are chosen by the people. One dif¬ 
ference between the Government of France and the 
Government of England is that there is in every 
county a man called a Prefect, who is chosen, not 
by the people of that county, but by the Govern¬ 
ment in Paris, and without whose consent the 
county councils and the town councils and the par¬ 
ish councils are not able to make any new rules or 
to carry out any improvements. 

If a man does wrong in France, he is tried, as he 
is tried in England, by a jury. Every man has a 
vote in France, but the women have no votes in 
France, though they now have votes in England. 
Every man, too, in France has to be a soldier for at 
least two years, and every child has to be sent to 
school. 

Perhaps the silliest of all the silly things that the 
English have believed and said about the French, 
is that they have no word that means what our 
English word “home” means, and that they do not 
understand what we call “home life.” I expect 
that, in the beginning, the English people, who 
went to France for a holiday, made this mistake, 
because French people spend more of their lives in 
the streets than we do. On a fine summer after¬ 
noon, men, women and children sit together at 
tables outside the cafes eating ices and drinking tea 
[214] 


From a lithograph by Joseph Nash 

KING LOUIS PHILIPPE RECEIVING AN ADDRESS FROM THE CORPORATION OF LONDON IN THE 
RUBENS ROOM AT WINDSOR CASTLE, 1844 


































































THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH 

and other drinks, and when the English visitor saw 
them, he thought to himself that, if these people 
had comfortable homes of their own, they would 
not spend their time at the cafe tables. As a matter 
of fact, no man values his home so highly, and no 
one regards his family with such constant care and 
affection, as the Frenchman does. I daresay you 
have heard the saying that an Englishman’s house 
is his castle. Very few Frenchmen who live in the 
big cities have houses of their own. Most of them 
live in flats. But a Frenchman’s flat is certainly his 
castle. He is very careful whom he admits into his 
castle. Only his greatest friends are ever invited 
to tea or to dinner, and he is much more careful 
than an Englishman is about the people whom his 
children know. 

From the moment that a Frenchman and a 
Frenchwoman marry and have children, their one 
thought is how to make their children’s lives happy 
and prosperous. They save their money in order 
that the children may be educated and have a good 
start in life. In England, when boys grow into men 
and girls grow into women, while their fathers and 
mothers still love them, they do not bother very 
much about what their children do, and they leave 
them to arrange their own lives in their own way. 
But in France, fathers and mothers never cease to 

[215] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

regard their boys and girls, however old they may 
be, as children for whose happiness they are respon¬ 
sible. The result of this is that if a Frenchman, 
forty years old, has a father of seventy, he will go to 
his father and ask his advice just as an English boy 
of ten would ask his father’s advice. He will kiss 
his old father whenever he meets him, and he will 
always treat him not only with affection but with 
great respect, looking on him as a man who must 
always be listened to and obeyed. French men and 
women have just the same feeling for their mothers. 
Indeed, these family ties, as they are called, are so 
strong in France that men and women, even when 
they are quite old, are never really happy if they 
are far away from their fathers and mothers and 
brothers and sisters and the rest of their families. 
I daresay you may have an uncle, or some near rel¬ 
ative, who has come from England, Canada or 
Australia and has made a home there. Every few 
years, he may go home for a holiday, and perhaps, 
every month or so, he may write a letter home. But 
everybody knows that he is quite happy in the coun¬ 
try in which he has settled, and that he means to 
live there most of his life and to die there, too. It 
is this love for going away to new countries and 
stopping there that has made the English what 
men call good colonists, and that has spread the 
[ 216 ] 


THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH 


English-speaking race all over the earth. The 
Frenchman is very different. He may go away to 
a far country, but however successful he may be 
there, he is longing all the time to go home. He 
would be most unhappy if he thought that he might 
die away from France, and, all the time, he is sav¬ 
ing his money and longing for the day when he can 
go back to the town where his family has always 
lived and where he will find his relations, waiting 
to receive him. 

In every comfortable English home there is 
always a nursery, a room that belongs to the chil¬ 
dren, and where the fathers and mothers only pay 
occasional visits. There are no nurseries in France 
except perhaps in the homes of very rich people. 
The children live all the time with their fathers and 
mothers, except, of course, when they are at school, 
On Sundays, in the summer, the whole family goes 
out together. If you go to Paris and go, on a Sun¬ 
day afternoon, to the Luxembourg Gardens or to 
the Bois de Boulogne, you will find fathers and 
mothers and children playing games together just 
like happy comrades. The fact that the children 
are always with their parents makes them seem per¬ 
haps to us English rather too grown-up. They have 
no world of their own as English children have, but 
it seems to me a good thing that they should know 

[ 217 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

so much more about their fathers and mothers than 
most English children do, that they should know 
that their fathers and mothers care for nothing so 
much as their children’s happiness. 

The law in France helps to strengthen this fam¬ 
ily tie. In England, if a man is wicked, he may 
waste all his money on selfish pleasures and leave 
his wife and children with no new clothes and not 
enough food, and, when he dies, he may give all his 
money to strangers and leave his family without 
any money at all. But in France, the law does not 
allow a man to do this. It insists that his family 
shall always have their fair share of the father’s 
income. 

There is a great difference, too, between the 
Englishwoman and the Frenchwoman. If a 
Frenchwoman’s husband has a shop, she is not con¬ 
tent to stop at home and leave her husband to look 
after the business, but every day she goes to the 
shop, and she nearly always sits at the desk and 
takes the money, so that no one has the chance of 
robbing her husband. When their husbands have 
successful shops, Englishwomen like to have nice 
houses and gardens and have their friends to tea 
and go to other people’s houses to tea. But most 
Frenchwomen have no time for this sort of thing, 
because they are always so busy helping their hus- 
[ 218 ] 


THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH 

bands and looking after their children. As I have 
told you, when they have any time to spare, they 
always want to spend it with their families. 

I dare say you have noticed in some Eng lish 
houses that the butcher and the baker and the fish¬ 
monger call at the back door every morning for 
orders. The mistress of the house tells the servants 
what she wants and they tell the tradesman, who 
comes back a few horn's afterwards with the meat 
and the bread and the fish that have been ordered. 
Nowadays, some mistresses send their orders to 
their tradespeople over the telephone. Often, of 
course, they go to the shops themselves, and this is 
what every Frenchwoman does every day of her 
life. No tradesmen call at the house in France, 
not even the milkman, but early in the morning the 
mistress and the cook go shopping together carry¬ 
ing a big string bag, and they bring home every¬ 
thing that they buy, and they never buy more than 
just enough for that one day. The Frenchwoman 
does not like to leave food over from one day to 
the next. 

The French people hate waste. In England 
there is almost as much food wasted as there is 
eaten. But the French eat everything that they 
buy. Even the stalks of cabbages and the shells of 
peas are used to make splendid vegetable soups. 

[ 219 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

The French are much better cooks than we are, and 
things that would be quite nasty in an English 
home are made very nice by the cleverness of the 
French cook. Food has always been much dearer 
in France than in England, and the French are 
generally poorer than the English. If you were a 
French child, and your father were a lawyer, or a 
doctor, or a bank clerk, or a shopkeeper, or a car¬ 
penter, he would not have nearly as much money as 
if he were an English lawyer, or an English doctor, 
or an English shopkeeper, or an English carpenter. 
But though the people are poorer and though food 
is dearer, because they are so careful not to waste 
anything and because they are such good cooks, the 
French on the whole are a better fed people than 
the English. 

Because he loves and respects his father and 
mother and thinks so much of his family, a French¬ 
man has also a deep love for the country to which 
he and his family belong. To the Frenchman, 
France is always the most splendid country in the 
world. Englishmen love England, but very few 
Englishmen ever say that everything in England is 
better than it is anywhere else. But that is exactly 
what most Frenchmen believe. Englishmen will 
make little jokes about themselves and about their 
country. But no Frenchman ever makes a joke 
[ 220 ] 


THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH 
about France, and he would be furiously angry if 
any one else made a joke about France in his 
hearing. 

I hope you will not think that because I want 
you to understand France and the French and to 
feel that the French are a fine people that I want 
also to persuade you that they have no faults. 
Every nation has its faults, and it is one fault of 
the French that they can never persuade themselves 
that their country can ever learn anything from 
any other country. They are graciously willing to 
teach other peoples, but they are generally obsti¬ 
nately determined not to learn. This almost fierce 
admiration for their own country has in the past 
caused considerable trouble in the world, and, alas! 
it may cause trouble again when you grow up. The 
thing for us to do is to make it so clear to the 
French that we admire their innumerable good 
qualities so much, that appreciation of our admira¬ 
tion may lead them to consider that they also may 
have faults to be remedied. 

The French are perhaps the most industrious 
people in Europe. In Paris the shops and offices 
are open hours before our shops and offices open, 
and men are busy at work while your fathers are 
shaving and having their baths. In the country the 
peasants, both men and women, work on their little 

[ 221 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

farms from dawn till dark. Englishmen would be 
terrified if they were asked to work as hard as most 
of the French work. The French love pleasure. 
They like to go to the theatre. They love reading 
books. Nowadays they are very fond of sport. But 
the first thing in their mind is to work hard and to 
save money for their children and their old age. 

If you were to take a long omnibus ride in Lon¬ 
don and go from the West End right away to the 
East End, you would find, as the journey went on, 
that the people who traveled with you in the omni¬ 
bus began to speak quite a different language. In 
the East End they drop their h’s, say “lidy” for 
“lady,” and use many words that you would never 
hear in the West End. If you were to journey 
across Paris in an omnibus, and if you could under¬ 
stand French well enough to make the comparison 
with London, you would find that the rich and the 
poor, the workman and the politician, all speak 
exactly the same. This is a great tie between the 
various classes, and it really makes it far easier for 
them to understand each other. 

I do not think that the French are better edu¬ 
cated than the English, nor do I think that they are 
really more clever or intelligent, but even the poor 
in Paris, the working men and their families, have 
a love for beautiful things which only quite a few 
[ 222 ] 


THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH 

people have in our country. You will see working 
men in the great picture galleries in the Louvre 
looking with pleasure at the pictures and obviously 
enjoying themselves immensely, and the same kind 
of people go to the theatre when plays by Shake¬ 
speare and other great writers are acted, and love to 
listen to fine music. All these things—great books 
and pictures and music—mean much more to the 
common Frenchman than they do to the common 
Englishman. 

In one other respect, the French and the English 
are very unlike. As you grow up, you will find that 
in the lives of men there are always many things 
hard and unpleasant and cruel. We English are 
what people call sentimental. We like to pretend 
that there are no hard, unpleasant, and cruel things. 
We try to persuade ourselves that black is really 
white. The French never do this. They have got 
very clear eyes. They see everything that exists 
round about them, and they do not shut their eyes 
and pretend that the things that they do not like are 
not there at all. They say: “There are good things 
in life and bad things, we have to take the bad with 
the good and make the best of things as we find 
them.” It is because the French do this that they 
have been called a nation of realists, just as we 
English are often called a nation of sentimentalists. 

[ 223 ] 


THE BOOK OF FRANCE 

In the course of my story I have had to tell you 
about the wars that took place between the French 
Catholics and the French Protestants. Nowadays 
there are very few Protestants left in France. A 
good many of the people never go to Church at all, 
though on Sunday mornings the churches in France 
are generally crowded with people. Even those 
Frenchmen who hardly ever go to church them¬ 
selves nearly always have their children baptized, 
and they generally like to be married by a priest. 

I have come now to the end of my story. Try and 
remember what I have told you. We have found 
that the French are our near relations, that their 
history and ours have been very much alike, that the 
English and the French fought against each other 
without much reason for hundreds of years, that the 
English soldiers did much harm to France and the 
French people, that, after all these years of silly 
quarrels, the two nations made friends and that 
their soldiers fought side by side in the Great War. 
We have learned that in the French Revolution, the 
French people led the rest of the world in the de¬ 
struction of the power of kings to oppress the com¬ 
mon people and make them unhappy, and in their 
determination that the common man should be free 
to live his own life in his own way. We have learned 
[ 224 ] 


THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FRENCH 
that the French are fond of making experiments 
and of trying new things, and that the rest of the 
world has learned very much from the experiments 
that the French have made. Our soldiers learned 
during the Great War that the French are brave 
and persistent and determined, and I have told you 
how industrious the French are and how they hate 
wasting anything. We have learned something 
about the French family and how devoted French 
mothers and fathers are to their children. We have 
learned that even the poor French people love 
beautiful things, and this love has resulted in the 
writing of splendid books and in the painting of 
beautiful pictures which all the world may enjoy. 
If I have told my story properly, and you have read 
it carefully, I have surely persuaded you that 
France is a nation, and the French are a people 
whom we may well love and admire, and that the 
friendship between our nation and theirs is some¬ 
thing which we must all always do our best to pre¬ 
serve and increase. 


THE END 


[ 225 ] 


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